When weather forecasters cry wolf
Dec. 16th, 2007 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterFor the last few days of last week, culminating in Friday evening, up to 9 inches of snow were predicted to arrive on Friday night. It even got to the point where the National Weather Service broke into the radio with the "we want to get your attention so we'll hurt your ears" tones to say there was a severe snow WARNING in effect for tonight, don't travel if you don't have to, put food and a flashlight in your car, etc. etc. blah blah blah. When I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, there were four registers open and the lines at all of them were four or five people long.
Saturday morning dawned bright and clear, with…no snow whatsoever. (We got about an inch of it Saturday night, but not enough to matter.)
It was amusing to visit the website of the local TV station with a big reputation for weather forecasting expertise and see the lengthy article they wrote, hastily explaining where the snow was that we didn't get. It seemed that a thin layer of warm air lurked right between two of the altitudes where they had sampled temperatures, completely invisible to the forecasters, and melted the snow as it came down. Those sneaky layers of warm air, huh? Even now, there's a lengthy article at the bottom of the tv station's weather page (if you're reading this very long after the posting date, it's probably gone) explaining the process by which weather is forecast. It's interesting to read, even if it does smack of an embarrased foot-shuffling "Um…we're smart. We know stuff. Really!"
Saturday morning dawned bright and clear, with…no snow whatsoever. (We got about an inch of it Saturday night, but not enough to matter.)
It was amusing to visit the website of the local TV station with a big reputation for weather forecasting expertise and see the lengthy article they wrote, hastily explaining where the snow was that we didn't get. It seemed that a thin layer of warm air lurked right between two of the altitudes where they had sampled temperatures, completely invisible to the forecasters, and melted the snow as it came down. Those sneaky layers of warm air, huh? Even now, there's a lengthy article at the bottom of the tv station's weather page (if you're reading this very long after the posting date, it's probably gone) explaining the process by which weather is forecast. It's interesting to read, even if it does smack of an embarrased foot-shuffling "Um…we're smart. We know stuff. Really!"
