I see the NWS forecast for the Eastern Seaboard is coming right in line with the Old Farmer's Almanac which was published back in late-August.
I always get a kick out of comparing the two. On one hand, we have a guy running MATLAB on a personal computer (using Windows I'm sure, or at least a Windows partition on a Mac, since the Windows version of MATLAB runs much faster) and solving a bunch of proprietary ordinary and partial differential equations versus a Chantilly, Virginia NWS staff of 50 running a $44.5 million supercomputer called Luna, the 51st most powerful supercomputer to date.
The Almanac has boasted an 80% accuracy rate for decades. And according to a regional newspaper article I read last last year, the NWS does almost 3% better than the Almanac on their long-range forecasts.
So, 10 - 12 grand (estimated for a top-end PC and commercial version of MATLAB with the requisite "toolboxes") and a staff of one meteorologist versus 44.5 million and a staff of 50 meteorologists, engineers, computer scientists/programmers, statisticians, mathematicians, technicians, support staff. Cost effective to get <3% better accuracy? Obviously just kidding, that Chantilly group does a lot more than just put out a rolling long-range forecast. And inside of 72 hours, they are the best we have by a wide margin.
BTW, Robert Thomas founded the Old Farmer's Almanac back in 1792. He believed that the Earth's weather could be reliably predicted by using sunspot data and apparently had goodness-of fit statistics to back up his beliefs, ergo, the early editions of the yearly Almanac were influenced heavily by sunspot predictions.