Look Back At Model Forecasts For Monday's Event

In an earlier post I had compared the GFS (top) and ECMWF (bottom) 500 mb forecasts at 144-hours that were valid at 1200 UTC Monday March 21st. The two were quite similar, with the main difference being the orientation of the west coast shortwave trough. The verifying analysis (from Univ. of Wyoming's upper-air page) appears, to me, to indicate that once again the ECMWF had the edge over the GFS. Both forecasts were, again in my opinion, extremely accurate given that the forecasts were for six-days out.
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On the very short-term, the NAM and U of A WRF forecasts on the mornng of Monday 21 March 2011 were both somewhat off in ther forecasts of precipitation accumulations. The NAM was a bit too optimistic with amounts across southeastern Arizona, while the WRF-GFS was on the low side. An average of both models' QPF forecasts for period ending at midnight Monday night came out about right - according to my very subjective eyeballing of the forecasts.