US National Weather Service gets it wrong again

[altivo]

So that's news? For two days they trumpeted the "terrible" snow storm that was going to hit us Friday evening. Well, Friday came with temperatures near 50 degrees and sunlight. It did cloud up later in the day, but seemed way too warm for snow. The weather map was revised, and the heavy snow warnings lifted for the northern portion of Illinois. Things began to look like rain, though the forecast for Wisconsin, just 5 miles north of the library, was a "snow advisory".

It didn't rain. At about 4:00 pm it started to flurry and by 4:30 snow was falling hard. Temperatures dropped into the 30s, and then the 20s. Snow was piling up. Someone came into the library and reported a major accident on US 14, the main highway through Harvard, involving a truck and a schoolbus and several cars. At 4:45 pm a city firefighter came in and "unofficially" advised us to close up and go home. Two of the four staff on duty live within blocks of the library and they decided to stay until the regular closing time of 5:30. The other two of us left at 5:00. US 14 was blocked, and though the damaged vehicles had all been removed, the police were out there in the snow with flares and measuring tapes. They were only letting a few vehicles through at a time, and traffic was backed up for a couple of miles northbound. Fortunately I was going south and got past it in about 15 minutes. Snow continued to fall harder. By the time I reached home, 15 miles south, it was hard to find the road. Everything was blanketed in snow deeply enough to obscure the road edges and drainage at the edges.

The weather service was still announcing "light snowfall with an accumulation of one to three inches, ending by midnight." I thought to myself that there were a lot of hours until midnight. The photos show how things looked around 8:30 pm, when it was still falling hard and the forecast had not been adjusted at all.

	Heavy snowfall 20 January 2006 20:38 At this point it had been falling like that for three hours. The weather service was still calling it just a "winter weather advisory" and predicting one to three inches accumulation. Note tops of bird feeders: there was already five inches or more on the ground.
	Fence rails January 20 2006 20:38 Snow accumulation on dog run fence from sunset to 8:30 pm. Notch at corner is where Rikkitoo went over the fence for his evening prowl, unfazed by the snow (in some ways, he remains a barn cat even though he has moved into the house) but he didn't stay out for long. Snow on the ground was up to his belly and still accumulating rapidly.

It wasn't until after 10 pm that the "heavy snow warning" was reissued. By then we had seven or eight inches on the ground and it was beginning to let up. More and more I think the weather service is relying entirely on computer modeling and ignoring what they would be able to see if they just looked out a window. That's just stupid.

Comments

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

*nuzzles the frosted Tivo*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mind the snow. *nuzzles back* It's quite beautiful and I'll have some daylight photos shortly, just shot a bunch of them.

It just irritates me that a government service agency is so wrapped up in politics and revising forecasts to keep people happy that it ignores the truth. Most people hate snow and dread it with great horror (I don't understand this but it's true) and therefore it's considered politically bad to deliver bad news. Instead they revise and revise and try to "minimize the damage" instead of just reporting the truth.

My unofficial measurements by shoving a yardstick into the snow show a range of 6 to 10 inches here, probably averaging out to about 7. It'll be interesting to see the actual accumulated snowfall map that comes out later this morning. I'll bet we still have only 4 inches because that was the extreme edge of their prediction.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Meteorology is a difficult science. It is not within our grasp, yet, to model every particle in the atmosphere, every bit of EM radiation from the sun, every cubic nanometer of shadows, sunlight refracted off the moon, etc. It would take a computer the size of Earth to accurately model the weather of Earth ... I'd be surprised if they found a way to get it right all of the time. In vast, flat areas, its hard not to imagine that the smallest of errors become monumental inaccuracies.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh sure. Meteorology is a minor interest of mine, and I understand all that. But my take on it is that they shouldn't pretend that their forecasts are more accurate than they actually are. If you go to the NOAA web site, for instance, they pretend to give "spot forecasts" for areas as small as a few square miles. This is mostly just absurd.

Yesterday's fiasco here was downright hazardous. There should have been a travel advisory and a heavy snow warning issued by 6 pm or so at the latest. My guess is that they didn't want to do that because they had them out twelve hours earlier and then repealed them. But they were needed. Several major highways here were blocked by the heavy snow or by accidents that resulted from the snow. People should not have been driving unnecessarily. Of course, some will anyway, but it is the mission of NOAA and NWS to provide the most accurate warnings of these things that they can. When they know they have made an error, they should correct themselves immediately instead of hoping the problem will go away. During the snowfall, visibility was as short as 25 feet. Roads were snow covered and dangerous, and I can just imagine what the airport conditions were. None of this was being reported by the weather service until four hours later.

Not predicting correctly is forgivable to a point. Not reporting what is happening right now and can be observed by anyone who opens a door or window is NOT forgivable.

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Me and my furry-tolerant friend went out last night to the hobby shop. The new Lionel catalog was just released. SQUEE! Anyway, it wasn't too bad until we hit the O'Hare oasis. Then it got icy. The clerk at the near-empty shop said "Only mad dogs and model railroaders would come out on a night like this." I might qualify for both those catagories, I thought to myself. After looking at the catalog all evening, I spent the night dreaming of miniature iron horses. Good stuff.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Lionel. Gosh, somewhere along the way years ago I had the impression that the Lionel name was dead and nothing new was being made under it. Do they still use those funny third rail type tracks or have they graduated to something more realistic looking? :)

I'll have to check. I assume the catalog is probably something I could buy or order online somewhere?

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

There was a lot of news a couple years back when the Lionel Corporation finally went under. While it originally was Lionel's original company, the line of model trains had at least three owners by then, the first was MPC, a subsidiary of General Mills. then various investors have been operating it to various degrees of success. Right now, the product line is good, they've bought the rights to American Flyer in the '80s, but are going through a lawsuit from a competitor. http://www.lionel.com will take you there, and you can peruse their on-line catalog.
I'm a scale modeler, and some of my peers look down at Lionel, as they make "toy" trains. But I never forgot my roots. (Which were America Flyer)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll have a look. :)

[derechodragon.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone with a degree in meteorology, let me say that it is extremely difficult to predict snowfall amounts. One inch of snow equals a tenth of an inch of rain, so not only do we need to say that water is going to fall from the sky, we need to say precisely how much of it is going to fall. A quarter-inch is the difference between 2-3 inches of snow. That's pretty tough to say, as it isn't being carried around by someone in a tank up there.

The public holds weather forecasting to a very high standard. They get just as many complaints if something is forecast that *doesn't* happen as they do if something occurs that was not forecast. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. Another side product of public demand influencing product is the ten-day forecast -- they aren't at all reliable, but the public wants a ten-day forecast, so now they get one.

As for why no one seemed to grasp events while they were happening, I can't offer up an explanation. While forecasting may have already plateaued, up-to-the-minute information about what is going on right now is better than ever. There's no good excuse I can think of why the authorities were not aware of what was happening and made no immediate statements about it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I do appreciate the vagaries of forecasting, and I don't mind being told "We're not certain which way it will go," or "One computer model says this, the other says that." But I object to being told that it is not going to snow when it's coming down in huge slushballs. Or that the total accumulation will not exceed 3 inches when there are already 5 new inches on the ground. That's just... inexcusable in my opinion.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

The Detroit weather office is claiming that the storm tracked farther north than they predicted, so the snow went farther north. We ended up with maybe one inch along the north Detroit city limits where they were saying several before. We actually had rain till about 5 a.m., instead of about 1 a.m. like they predicted. I knew we'd get less snow than farther north, but I did expect to have to shovel today. I could probably wear my tennis shoes, in fact.

Over the holidays, I saw a lot of home weather stations for sale in the stores. I wonder if that's because we should start relying on ourselves for weather forecasting?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I got one of those for Christmas in fact. It's not that great for predicting, but at least it tells you what the weather service seems to have forgotten: what's actually happening outdoors. My big peeve with them the last few years has always been the same. They are completely running off their imaginations. They will say, for instance, that it's raining in Marengo when I can look out my window and see the sun. Or it's sunny when the clouds are so thick you expect them to be hit by lightning at any moment.

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

Nobody ever really takes weather forecasting seriously in New England because most of the time, the forecast is wrong. When they forecast "heavy snow," we all know it could be anything from an inch to 3 feet, and it could be snow, sleet, rain, or anything inbetween. I don't see it as a fault in meteorology, but rather the unpredictable nature of the weather in the Northeast.

Unfortunately, NOAA, like everything else, is a victim of budget cuts. They've closed a lot of local weather offices and replaced human weather spotters with ASOS stations (Automated Something Something Stations).

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the forecast being wrong as long as they are honest about their doubts. Saying "40 percent chance of" makes sense to me. My complaint is saying "It's a beautiful sunny day" when in fact it's pouring cats and dogs. I keep seeing them do this. They spend all their time in windowless bunkers relying on computer models, and never step outside I guess.

I'm aware of the budget cuts (of which I heartily disapprove, like everything done by the current administration) and the attempt to completely eliminate the weather service that was floated by a couple of idiots two years ago. They proposed to "privatize" it by leaving it in the hands of the Weather Channel, et al. As if those guys didn't depend on NOAA data, and as if they were any better, which they aren't. It was, as usual, a Republican attempt to force more money into the hands of wealthy shareholders.

Still, it really gripes me when they say "three inches maximum" when there is already five inches on the ground. That's just plain idiotic. The official chart now shows up to 12 inches in some of the area that was covered by that report. Getting the forecast wrong I understand, but trying to deny the truth when you've already been proven wrong I can't grasp.

Wimps

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Dear Rider,

As you may know, where I come from, this is not a big snow storm. Now, if you get two feet or more in a day or two, and it is forty below F (or C - they coincide) you can whine. Here in SW MIchigan, they close schools on what would be a very normal Winter day in Alaska. But then I am a big, tough, STALLION!

Imperator ducks under the covers with you and wraps his purewhite wings around ya. *shivvers* "Brrr." *wink*

Re: Wimps

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree, where you came from recently, that's true. But think about where you came from originally. Imagine even half this being dumped there. See? It's all relative.

I am not afraid for my own ability to manage a vehicle on snow and ice covered roads. However, I'm very much afraid of the idiots who do NOT know how to do it, who insist on driving at 70 mph anyway because they have an SUV or a Dodge RAM truck, and who are a threat to my continued existence and safety. Limited or nonexistent visibility does hamper even me, and that was part of the problem Friday. (And this morning too. Now we have freezing fog because a warm breeze blew in from the south overnight and raised dense clouds of it from the snowcover.

*Tivo nickers happily at being wing-wrapped and snuggles close. Maybe he'll get up and make a pizza later, no point in summoning out a delivery person in this weather.*

[pioneer11.livejournal.com]

I was told, by someone old and wise back in the 80s
(there was this guy see, he was 76 and I was...okay
lets move on...)

"Son, your 80 percent is prolly better then most
peoples 100 percent"

Though...today, in my dotage, I revised that down
to my 10 and their 200.

Okay sue me.

But yeah...yer right.