Having spent two hours this morning shoveling the predicted 1-3 inches of snow – we got about six in Southmont — I’m not feeling kindly toward the weather geeks.
Their ridiculous, unending, inaccuracy seems to be across the board, like maybe they’re all reading from the same hymnal, just as Lame-Stream Media sing in unison, Russia, Russia, Russia, or Constitutional Crisis, Constitutional Crisis, Constitutional Crisis at any given time.
Why this is so with weather I can’t understand. These local TV stations all proudly proclaim the presence of their staff metereologist, plus assorted similary credentialed minions. They have super gigabillion watt radar, cameras and weather stations scattered throughout their viewing area, and access to a seemingly endless amount of weather services and online weather tools.
You’d think they could spit out some different, and accurate forecasts. But, no, they are a low-accuracy echo chamber where it seems to be better to be wrong in lockstep than to take the risk of being right alone.
Forgive me for noting they seemed to do better when they looked out the window and just went with their observations.
If you live where I live, they’ve absolutely blown the past three or four winter storms, but with a twist of constantly underestimating snow fall and/or how cold it would get.
In the past, they pushed weather porn, predicting virtual Armageddon on each occasion of an approaching storm and, when these dire predictions almost never proved accurate, they would come on the air with some version of “Whew, we dodged a big one.”
Terrified viewers, who had rushed to stores in prior days to buy out supplies of milk, bread and toilet paper, never seemed to hold a grudge with the weather people. Instead, they were grateful that they had not come face-to-face with disaster, forgetting that the only indication of said impending disaster was the over-active imaginations of the weather people.
Long ago, I swore off the local weather people and their changing cast of characters. In the case of the NBC affiliate headquartered nearby that thinks it’s in Centre County, weather guy turnover in the past in some cases has had to do with legal problems.
But even the formerly trustworthy sources such as AccuWeather.com or Weather.com, have failed miserably this winter.
They have become so predictably bad that I make allowances. Today that meant setting my alarm for two hours earlier than I might have needed to shovel away an inch of snow and clean a car. The way I looked at it, if they finally got one right, I could shovel, come in and relax with a cup of tea, then send the various household members off on their appointed rounds.
As I hefted my first shovelful of snow this morning, I was extremely grateful for that extra time.
Upon returning from one errand, we commiserated with a neighbor out shoveling snow for the umpteenth time in recent days. She noted, without prompting, that she’s tired of these 1-3 inch predictions that always undershoot.
Join the crowd.
We parted with shared envy — that professionals could be so consistently wrong and still maintain their jobs.
Can we get DOGE to look into weather types?
Sam Ross Jr's site 