When I was in college I took a semester of Meteorology as an elective...I went to class literally just for the tests, the only studying I did was reading the book all the way through as if it were a novel, I made a high B! The underlying principles of meteorology just are not that hard to comprehend. BUT....actually predicting the weather for any given location is extremely hard. The variables involved are temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, atmospheric pressure, surface composition and reflectivity (concrete, grass, dirt, etc...) , altitude, humidity, cloud cover, spin of the Earth, tilt of the Earth relative to the sun, etc... There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of variables.
I know what your saying..."Plankster, if you know its so difficult to do then why do weather men suck?"
Well, I tell you my fellow blogger! It's their combination of ignorance and arrogance that pisses me off. All of their models have a known degree of error. Why don't they ever pass that on? "Tomorrow is going to be a low between 25 and 31 and a high between 41 and 47." Nooooo, it's always, "Tomorrow is going to be a low of 28 and a high of 44." Cocky jack ass!
Take a look at this:
This is the forecast for Fort Worth for December 16th and 17th. As you can see the high on the 16th is going to be 37 and the low on the 17th is going to be 42. That means that at exactly midnight Tuesday night the temperature will miraculously jump 5 degrees! If they showed the plus/minus that included the error you wouldn't have these stupid issues.
Bottom line Mr. (or Mrs.) Weather person....you have multi-million dollar satellites in orbit, thousands of collection points such as radar stations, weather stations, storm chasers, you have some of the most sophisticated computer modeling software in the world and some of the fastest supercomputers to run it on and you still can't get it exactly right...and that's ok. But don't get on TV in your nice suit and your fake smile and spout statistical maybes as if they're fact. It only takes a little bit of humility to say "it might" instead of "it will" and even sometimes the forbidden "I don't know".
9 comments:
Take it easy, man. Haha. But then again I agree with you. BTW that's a lot of variables indeed!
Assuming it actually rises to 37 degrees....
LOL! I think you will notice that the tolerance for their arrogance and/or mistakes is directly proportional to your opinion of their appearance. ;-)
Since I'm in Fort Worth, I prefer tomorrow's forecast over today's. Please go on TV and make the correction. If you clean-up good, I'll probably believe you and like you.
AMEN BROTHA! You know it's bad when you see David Finfrock in the mall food court and all you can think of is punching that mustache off of his face. Arrogant bastard! Let's get some question marks up on that forcast!
Hans - I know I get carried away sometimes but if I was wrong that much I'd be fired.
ReformingGeek - I do clean up well and I have confidence that I could take my one semester of meteorology and get on TV and provide a very believable forecast that has a 50% chance of being correct.
Turkish - The trick would be to actually assault or kill him...that way you're sure to get a jury trial. There's not a jury anywhere that would begrudge you taking out a compulsive liar!
The thing is, the general public likes exactness, but the general public has no memory retention.. So you can say the high will be ** deg. and the lows will be ** deg.. But the only thing the general public will remember is that Britney had a birthday party and ET covered it. or that little Johnny’s kung fu match is at 6:30 not 7:00. So what I am saying is that the mass of people out there really don’t give a rats ass about what it will be approximately, just that it’s going to be 55 deg.
Mike - did you ever think that dumb shit like this is why the public doesn't give a shit...maybe they are trained to be sheep by Television. Seems like on top of being entertainment for billions it has also become an all to easy baby sitter for the young...but that's for another blog.
Good point!
I predict the weather by how many joints ache (and have done so since I was 10). I tell the temperature by how tightly the rhododendron leaves outside my kitchen window are rolled. Then, of course, there's always the good old fashioned technique of just looking at the sky to see what's going on. Yeah, the Weather Channel would be broke if they depended on me.
Marjie - I bet your methods are just as accurate as the Weather channel's daily forecast for your area...just a guess.
Hey, next time someone calls David Finfrock a fucking bastard... THINK OF HOW YOU'D feel if that was your forcast, i just happen to know him ,im fifteen and considered a meteorological genius and goddammit i hope all of you sons of bitches go to hell! I idolized the man and for your information hes not arogant either. I amthe next weather girlto be and plank ...I got an A plus in Atmo 273,274 and 275. So shove it!
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