About the challenge
Children write down a judgment, wait for reality, and see the gap honestly. That is the scientific method at its cheapest: one number, one deadline, one real answer.
Mission
The RUDO™ Weather Challenge is an online forecast-and-verify challenge for young people aged 10–17, with an Open Division for adults. It is not a weather lookup site, a modelling bootcamp, or an essay contest. The error is the score. Reasons, notes and creative work go into a private learning record and never change the score.
It is free for families, and paid tools never add points.
Three layers
Program
RUDO™ Weather Challenge
The standing name, repeated every season. A program of RUDO™ Learning Hub.
Ruler
Boston Anchor
One station, one variable, one cutoff, the same for everyone in the world. It stays across seasons; a second anchor may be added later, never swapped in.
Season theme
El Niño Learning Season 2026–27
What the lessons focus on this winter. The theme changes each season; the ruler does not.
Why Boston, for everyone in the world
- Fairness needs one ruler. If everyone forecast their own town, a calm-climate city would always look easier than a stormy one. One shared station makes every error comparable.
- Boston weather is genuinely hard and interesting in winter: ocean influence, coastal storms, sharp cold fronts. A good forecast is a real achievement.
- The data is public, timely and documented: a daily climate report, a public gridpoint forecast, long-term normals, and an independent archive for audit.
- Forecasting a place you have never been teaches you to read maps and data instead of looking out of the window. Families are welcome to practise on their home town on their own, just for learning.
What we learned from competitions around the world
Before writing the rules we read the public rule pages and published papers of established forecasting games and youth STEM programs. None of these organisations is affiliated with RUDO; we simply learned from what they publish.
| Pattern we saw | What we did |
|---|---|
| University forecast contests (for example WxChallenge and campus games) score temperature by absolute error per degree and freeze forecasts at a fixed clock time. | Absolute error, computed exactly; one fixed cutoff stated in EST and UTC; the server clock decides. |
| Some contests penalise missed days with a consensus value plus a penalty. Good Judgment Open instead scores a skipped question as zero relative score, with no penalty. | Missed rounds are never penalised or filled in. Children get sick and have exams. |
| Metaculus counts low coverage as if it were higher, so one lucky question cannot win a medal, and allows one account per person. | Exact coverage is always shown; a 60% badge rewards consistency. Any future ranking needs full coverage of a frozen core set, and one participant per person. |
| Kaggle limits submissions per day to reduce probing. | At most 20 versions per participant per round, and other people's forecasts are never shown before the cutoff. |
| FIRST and Technovation have a parent create the account and add the child, with media consent separate from participation consent. | A guardian creates the family and adds each child; participation and publication consent are separate switches. We go further and collect no names or emails at all. |
| Certificate Transparency (RFC 9162) shows how an append-only log with signed receipts lets anyone check that history was not rewritten. | Every forecast gets a sha256 receipt; each round freezes a manifest; events go on a hash chain anyone can read. |
| NWS notes that daily climate values are preliminary and may be revised, with final quality control months later. | Results are provisional for 7 days, then final; later revisions are archived for audit but do not change scores. |
We also chose to avoid some common practices: piecewise precipitation scores that can be gamed, live leaderboards with exact scores, collecting location or photos, and any paid entry.
Honest reporting
At the end of the season we will publish real numbers, even if they fall short of our goals: how many people submitted on time, how many completed three or more rounds, rounds delayed by data, appeals and how long they took, and a section called "what we did not achieve this season".
Team
RUDO™ Learning Hub by LIGHT HOPE
RUDO is a learning and technology platform, not a weather agency. RUDO and RUDO Weather Challenge are unregistered working names, marked with ™ only.