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Abstract
State Departments of Transportation spend a considerable portion of their winter maintenance
budgets getting accurate weather forecasts that are essential for proactive operations and are
interested in getting the best value for their money. With that intention, the Kansas Department
of Transportation obtained weather forecasts from three commercial weather data providers for
four selected locations within the state of Kansas. This paper presents a quality analysis of those
forecasts to identify the most accurate and reliable provider. In doing so, researchers used the
prediction of frost events as the performance measure. Several different measures that were capable
of quantifying the selected attributes (reliability, accuracy, and skill) were used to evaluate different
forecasts for each location and for combined data.