Bad Weather

It’s snowed about 50 inches here in the Northeast this winter, and that’s fine. I like lots of snow. So anybody north of Tampa needs to shut their mouth and just deal.

What bugs me is the weatherdroids. Take the Christmas blizzard. Until the day before, and including the day of, I heard TV stations and radio calling for maybe a dusting on eastern Long Island. And we get two feet of snow.

I guess you win some and you lose some. Well, not really. Exactly a month later, I watched the Today show forecast a sunny day when outside the window next to the TV, 12 inches of snow would fall. It would never get sunny. That’s in addition to the 8 inches the night before, which had been marked with ‘flurries’. Now that’s just plain old lazy. You’d think they’d want to trump up the fact we’re going to get killed, since weather is as much about ratings as forecasts.

And I realize weather in an inexact science. You don’t know what two fronts are going to do when they collide — will they shit on each other, or you? So I don’t care if you forecast 4 inches and we get 8.

It’s the ‘guarantee.’ You can count on it, it’s Accu-this and Doppler 25000 that.  That’s the part that bugs me. They give a ‘pinpoint’ forecast of 4 to 18 inches of snow. I wish I could be that pinpoint accurate at work. I’ll get that done somewhere between April and the October of the following year — and I can call that accurate.

The studies say they’re between 70% and 80% accurate, but read the fine print: that’s only for temperature, and then only in the 2-day timeframe, and then only by a company that the weather services pay to rate them.

Eventually it gets down to 50%, which is like flipping a coin…