Question

Monica works at a regional weather office on the Atlantic coast. She notes (from the office records) that hurricanes have made landfall on the coast somewhere near their city of Johnstown in the past 11 years. Monica notes that forecasted landfall has been different from actual observed landfall as shown in the table below.

YEAR	ACTUAL (MILES FROM JOHNSTOWN)	24-HOUR FORECAST (MILES FROM JOHNSTOWN)
1	4	6
2	5	5
3	30	40
4	2	10
5	12	13
6	7	5
7	11	11
8	21	25
9	12	8
10	12	15
11	6	9

How accurate has the forecast been? Do you think this difference matters to a beach town? Can you develop a forecasting system model that may be more accurate?

Answer 1

The accuracy of forecast can be measured by mean percentage error.

The error percentage is very high. The forecast is very less acuurate.  

Yes, it matters to the beach town. When the forecast accuracies are so low, one cannot predict actual location of hurricane and damages would be high becuase if inaccurate forecasts

>> Let us use five month moving average model

This gives forecasts more accurate than the ones given in the question