It was overcast with flurries Tuesday, producing the need for a winter pick-me-up.
Right on cue, the noon weather on the local station provided a few laughs and chuckles.
The theme of this episode of Stormwatch, Severe weather, Weather porn, We’re all going to die! Weather, Weather, Weather was frigid temperatures.
Understand that today’s flurries were expected to produce a fraction of an inch of fresh white stuff. Barring the foot or so we got last week, this has been a below-average winter in terms of snow.
But how can you put the fear into the populace with reports of one-quarter inch or so of snow? Of course you concentrate on cold temperatures.
It would help to make the weather porn more impactful, though, if the words and images could somehow match. I understand this is asking a lot in our “no one’s perfect” world. Still, I’m thinking the coordination between audio and video should be better than this example.
Understand that I do not watch this stuff on my own. But the wife had it on and I decided to monitor it for a bit.
“Brrr. Brrr. Brrr,” said the woman giving the weather, which I guess is meteorologist-speak for it’s going to be cold.
If what she said is correct, it’s going to be very cold. She flashed up a graphic that showed Johnstown staring at minus-25 overnight Wednesday into Thursday.
“This is actually how cold it’s going to get,” she emphasized, not the “feels-like” phenomenon of windchill.
The obligatory advice was given to protect oneself and bring in the pets.
But, wait a minute. A seven-day weather graphic that followed had minus-25 nowhere to be found. The projected high for Tuesday was 28 degrees. The overnight low into Wednesday morning was put at 3 degrees.
The high Wednesday was estimated to be 14 degrees and the overnight low between Wednesday and Thursday was listed not at minus-25, but instead minus-2.
Huh?
Where’d the minus-25 go?
Being a trained journalist, I don’t tend to believe blindly all I’m told. It seemed to me minus-25 just might be historic, although the weather purveyor didn’t think that prospect was worth mentioning.
Checking weather data on PSU.edu, the closest reporting station data I could find was Pittsburgh.
The all-time low for January, February or March in Pittsburgh was minus-22 on Jan. 19, 1994.
An archived story from the Johnstown newspaper, documenting the severe cold of January 2009, cited newspaper records to identify minus-18, achieved both in 1912 and 1994, as the coldest January temperature observed in Johnstown.
Minus-25 would, indeed, be historic!
These local TV weather types love to point out that they are forecasting for a large area geographically, so if somewhere within their claimed coverage area gets something weather-wise that they predicted, they count it as a win.
The problem is in this case nowhere on their huge map indicated a low anywhere near minus-25 for Wednesday into Thursday.
I eagerly await Wednesday night into Thursday to see what the actual low is. I’m betting it will be closer to minus-2 than minus-25.
And whoever does the weather on Thursday will indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation for warning us that it would be cold, conveniently forgetting the details.
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