> The Weather Service also assesses its precipitation forecast, but the patterns are a little harder to unpack — especially with just one year’s worth of data — so we stuck with temperature.
that seems like flimsy justification. I'd love to see the lead plot with precipitation.
For precipitation you will be getting percent chance often with an interval, 10% chance of 0.1-0.25 inches with higher likely in thunderstorms. Also precipitation patterns tend to be much more irregular within small spatial extents. You can asses things like calibration and perhaps take a mean value for there intervals to get point errors. But all of this will make it harder to communicate actual performance.
In the same vein as you, I don't care much if it is raining at my office closer to the mountains but I care about it at home. The distance is ~10 miles and I regularly can see a difference.