👋 fellow open water sports enthusiasts.
The trust you put in our forecasts is of crucial importance for us. That's why, this week we're happy to release confidence scores for our diving visibility forecasting tool. We calculate confidence scores based on the quality of data we get from satellites and other data sources and show it right next to the visibility forecast.
You can check it live now at uk.marla.blue. Let's dive into details, shall we?
How we calculate confidence scores
The quality of input variables we receive from our external providers varies. Sometimes cloudy and unpredictable weather leads to our model ingesting data that is less accurate, and that results in a prediction we're less confident in.
We aggregate the quality of different variables we get from satellites into a single confidence score between 0% (low confidence) and 100% (high confidence). These are based on the granularity of satellite data we have access to, uniformity of predicted visibilities and whether satellite readings were interfered by clouds.
Comparing against diver reports
We have used the diver reports from our Marla users (kudos to everyone who shared their dive reports with us!) to understand the informativeness of our new confidence scores. We found a significant correlation between confidence scores and prediction errors of Marla's forecast validated over your dive reports [1]. For the forecast with high confidence scores we observe good alignment between our forecasts and diver reports (small prediction errors). Conversely, we observe higher disagreement between our forecasts and diver reports (higher prediction errors) for the forecasts with lower confidence scores.
We hope this new feature will give you an extra tool to help plan your next dives! Please, share with us any feedback you have! [1] Prediction error is the absolute difference between the visibility that divers reported and the visibility that we forecasted for that place at that time.
Comments