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

[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.