Weather Forecasts

I don’t understand the weather segments during the tv daily/nightly news. First of all, everyone knows they’re wrong most of the time when the weather is bad…which is when you need accuracy the most…and yet they still get paid, still get to keep their jobs. How many times over the years have we woke up to snow and asked, “Was it supposed to snow today?” Their explanation is that there are so many variables and factors involved, it’s nearly impossible to completely predict. That’s fine, I get that. So I propose that instead of putting up images of a weekly forecast with exact temps with little raindrops or snowflakes underneath, put up question marks for each day of the week and say we have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen here. Just tell people dress in layers, literally anything could happen. Tornadoes, snowmageddons, cats and dogs, nothing is off the table. Instead, they sound so confident in telling everyone what to expect that we then get suckered into believing them because they’re dressed so nice in their gorgeous shoes, matching gloves, hats, scarves, bowties, blazers, earmuffs, dramatic lighting, perfect umbrellas, and professional makeup bold enough that we can see them through a blizzard. But then wham! Temperatures are actually 40 degrees or 40 inches of snow in the opposite direction of what they said to expect. Not even close! I think if they were close and a little off, nobody would even say anything. But they’re WAY OFF!! Maybe if their outfits were more unprofessional, we’d be more apt to think hmmm, this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. Instead we think, “Oh look at that beautiful and smart weather lady with her perfect hair, she must have the best state of the art equipment to help her analyze the sky.” Nope. It’s all a mirage. At my son’s college graduation in May years ago, they said it would be 95 degrees with 0% chance of rain. All the ladies in the audience had sleeveless dresses with a ton of suntan lotion because that sun can really reflect off of the aluminum bleachers. Of course 5 minutes into the first speaker’s speech, the clouds roared in and it poured so hard you could barely see for the entire 3 hour outdoor ceremony, and the temperature dropped to a bone chilling 55 degrees. Nobody had umbrellas, and nobody wanted to leave….so we all sat there for hours, freezing and drenched. We all looked like we just swam the Pacific in all the graduation pictures, and pneumonia was had by all. That’s what I mean by not even close! Another thing that confuses me is how fast they time lapse the Doppler Radar past the day. They spend 10 minutes standing there talking in vague terms, pointing out the clouds in the sky, looking at their backyard displays, rambling on and on about last week’s weather which we already experienced and know about, but when they show the map for the hours we’ve been waiting to hear about and need to know about, they fast forward the weather pattern to hyper speed so that it’s impossible to see the hourly breakdown of what to expect. Zip! There goes a two second ambiguous reference about what to expect…and now it’s time to go back to looking at the backyard display for no reason. I sit there thinking what just happened? Is it going to rain or snow during my outdoor bbq or what? I learned absolutely nothing from this segment. I saw a green blip start at one end of the state and then it zipped to the other end in a half a millisecond, and that’s my forecast? Did that blip hit where my house is or not? But then my family reminds me that they’re going to be wrong any way, so stop staring at the screen expecting an answer. So for this year I hope and pray for world peace, good health for everyone, and more accurate weather forecasts to help us through it all!