National Weather Service admits forecast error

The BBC has an article about a little forecasting 'oops':

The National Weather Service has admitted its forecasts were wrong, after predicting a "potentially historic blizzard" would strike New York City. The city was largely spared as the storm piled deep snow on Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Mayor Bill de Blasio denied he had overreacted to warnings, saying he could only go on information available: "We had to take precautions to keep people safe."
On Monday, an emergency was declared in a swathe of north-eastern states, and meteorologists predicted up to three feet of snow. Officials later downgraded the numbers.
New York City authorities imposed a driving ban (since lifted) and took the unprecedented step of shutting the subway.
But, on Tuesday, New Yorkers awoke to a blanket of snow less deep than feared, and since then city life has been getting back to normal.
"Would you rather be prepared or unprepared? Would you rather be safe or unsafe?" asked de Blasio, defending the moves. "My job as the leader is to make decisions and I will always err on the side of safety and caution." 

Analysis by Nick Bryant for the BBC in New York City:

Shutting down the New York City subway system, for the first time in its history because of snow, can easily be viewed in retrospect as overkill. So does bringing in a car curfew, which banned non-emergency vehicles from the streets from 11pm on Monday night.
Walking the empty streets of Manhattan pre-dawn, and seeing the snow, we all found ourselves asking the same question: "Is that it?"
It reminded me of that scene from Crocodile Dundee, when Mick Dundee is confronted by New York City muggers wielding a switchblade. "That's not a knife," he says, pulling out a much scarier weapon. "That's a knife."
That's not a storm, some New Yorkers told us, as they made their way to work, muttering that Bill de Blasio had got it badly wrong. 

Other areas of New York state saw much heavier snowfall, with "blizzard conditions" across Long Island, according to the NSW. A teenage boy was later killed in a sledding accident in the area. Worst affected elsewhere were Connecticut and Massachusetts, with the heaviest snowfall recorded outside Boston , with three feet of snow in Lunenburg by Tuesday night. In Connecticut, an elderly man collapsed while shoveling snow. He died later in the hospital. 

At the scene: Gary O'Donoghue for the BBC in Scituate, Massachusetts:
Flooding is a big threat here. The town of Scituate is bracing itself for a high tide in the coming hours and the neighboring town of Marshfield has already had its sea wall breached. Some along this coast have already been evacuated from their homes, and the streets are largely empty of people. The storm is expected to continue to whip the eastern part of the state until early Wednesday and only after that can a true assessment be made of its impact. The storm also caused coastal flooding in Massachusetts. High tides breached a sea wall and damaged eleven homes in Marshfield, thirty miles south of Boston. The state's only nuclear power station shut down after the blizzard interrupted its power flow. Thousands of people are still without power, more than fifty thousand of them in Massachusetts. But Governor Charlie Baker said the snow had been "fluffier and lighter" than anticipated, meaning there were less power outages. Flights are set to resume at Boston's Logan International Airport, along with trains to New York City and Washington. But air travel remains disrupted, with more than eight hundred flights cancelled.
The blizzard brought up over thirty inches of snow in Connecticut. "The wind here is tremendous, it's difficult to see very far out the window," said Christie Craigheard in New Hampshire, another of the affected areas.
The NWS is still warning of potentially life-threatening conditions along the New England coast, as the storm heads north into Canada. Meteorologists expect the snow to continue into early Wednesday in eastern New England.

Rico says better that than the other way around...