Jim Hughes, the amateur forecaster from the DC area who stuck his neck out here on the WeatherBlog three weeks ago and predicted "wild" winter weather during the period of Jan. 14-16, is taking a bow this morning for a (nearly) dead-on prognostication.

As we noted here at the time, Hughes has no formal training in meteorology, space science or solar science, from which he formulates his predictions. And he has scored some hits and misses in the past. It could also be argued that forecasting "accumulating snow" for mid-February is not a bad bet. Eight of the biggest 25 snowstorms ever recorded in Baltimore have occurred between the 10th and 20th of February. It's a snowy time of year.

But in a winter with very little snow, writing in a month with none, he came remarkably close to calling what is likely to be the biggest snowstorm of the 2005-06 season - and he did it 16 days before the snow started flying. It might well have been chance, or luck. But I figure he's entitled to a few bytes here to toot his horn:

"You have got to admit that the weather this week seems more like March than February, with this wild roller coaster ride... down ...up ..down...sort of sounds a little like what I wrote about a few weeks ago.

"I read your piece about the snowstorm...Maybe NWS and the Baltimore OCM's forecasted this storm well but our locals did not. ALL of them downgraded their totals late Saturday afternoon into Saturday night. Bob Ryan went from like 6-12 ...to 3-6 in some areas. Then they acted like they nailed the storm on Sunday when people were calling in about 14-22 inch storm totals. The Washington Post even ran a time line story on Monday. Pointing out exactly when they changed their numbers and what they said on air. Tony Kornheiser even went on a little rampage Monday morning on his daily radio show ... about their miscues and not admitting it ...

"I would like to point out, Frank, that 70-80% of the snow...even precip... fell on Sunday at DCA...So mine was a 2 day miss....Plus let's not forget that space weather data is all in Universal Time....So I have a five-hour time difference to work with....7pm Sunday was the 13th (in UT).....DCA was officially experiencing heavy snow at 7am Sunday.....36 hours before my data time frame. The locals OCM's said that this was going to be a Saturday storm (90 % of it) on Thursday. It was not.. So they missed it by 6-10 hours.... some 72 hours in advance and I missed it by 36-48 hours..... 18 days in advance....The math says mine was just as a good or better.... they get an A- to B - rating.... Capital Weather.com ...MET's run it... gave them this.

"What do I get ? Nothing from them.....Local ABC ... OCM Doug Hill told me not a bad call in an e-mail Tuesday night...Montgomery County Gazette also ran a small piece about my forecast yesterday but the MET's as a whole are quiet...once again. This just goes to show that it is the messenger here. They want one of their own to get credit for any kind of finding and not some amateur ... BTW I really appreciated your public comments about my forecast. Thanks. Jim"