The performance of Climate Information Service in delivering scientific, local, and hybrid weather forecasts: A study case in Bangladesh

Access to reliable and skillful Climate Information Service (CIS) is crucial for smallholder farmers in Bangladesh to mitigate the impacts of rainfall variability and extremes. This study aims to systematically evaluate the performance of CIS in providing Scientific Forecast (SF) and Local Forecast (LF) to smallholders in Bangladesh. The results were then compared with farmers' perceptions of the forecast accuracy. Additionally, the skill of a simple hybrid forecast (HF), which is an integrated system of SF and LF, was assessed using the ERA5 and ground observation datasets as benchmarks. The SF and LF data were obtained from the meteoblue hindcast and from the interview, respectively. The results indicate that, overall, LF exhibits slightly higher skill compared to SF when evaluated against the ERA5 dataset. The forecast performance, however, declines by almost half when the ground-based observations are used, associated with high false alarms. Farmers, on the other hand, perceived SF to possess superior performance compared to LF. This study demonstrates that combining the SF and LF into a simple HF yields higher forecast skill than either individual forecast, highlighting the importance of HF to deliver a reliable and trustworthy weather forecast.