SPRINGDALE — Dana Whitcombe-Ruiz, chief meteorologist at Channel 7 News, formally requested a raise Tuesday after an internal audit determined that her forecasts were accurate 40 percent of the time, a figure she described as “historic, and also the only one I have ever been given credit for.”

Whitcombe-Ruiz presented her findings to station management in a 14-slide deck titled “Two Out of Five Ain’t Bad (It Is Actually Pretty Good).” The deck included a bar graph, a pie chart, and a photograph of a cloud she said “did exactly what I told it to.”

“For years, viewers have said I am wrong constantly,” she told reporters outside the station. “I have now confirmed that this is only true 60 percent of the time. I did not win that 40 percent. I earned it.”

The audit, conducted over eleven months by the station’s intern, found that Whitcombe-Ruiz correctly predicted rain on 41 of 102 occasions. She was credited with an additional 6 correct forecasts for “partly cloudy,” a category the audit notes “is basically always true by lunchtime.”

Management has not responded directly to the raise request, though station general manager Gerald Pellham said in a statement that he was “pleased to see Dana taking initiative” and that the station would “review the data, the clouds, and her contract in that order.”

Dr. Prudence Okonkwo-Baptiste, Senior Fellow in Probabilistic Optimism at the Institute for Applied Shrugging at Lower Tidewater Community College, said the result should be viewed in context. “A coin flip is right 50 percent of the time, so technically Ms. Whitcombe-Ruiz is outperformed by a quarter in someone’s pocket,” she said. “However, a coin has never stood in front of a green screen and pointed at Ohio with this much conviction. That has to be worth something.”

“I said ‘a 70 percent chance of showers,’ and showers occurred somewhere, to someone. That is a win for the field of meteorology.”

Whitcombe-Ruiz has framed the request as a matter of labor fairness, noting that her colleague in sports, who predicts the outcomes of games that have already been played, has received three raises. “He is right 100 percent of the time because he reads the score off a card,” she said. “I am out here doing the hard work of guessing.”

She also noted that she has been forced to apologize on-air for rain, which she called “a personal affront, given that I only mentioned it.”

Viewers have been split. Local resident Tom Haverstraw, 54, said he supports a raise “as long as it is only 40 percent of it, and as long as it arrives at some point this week, probably.”

At press time, Whitcombe-Ruiz had amended her request to a 60 percent raise, explaining that the previous number “had a high chance of being wrong, and I would like to be wrong in the other direction.”