If you watched the news here in Cleveland, you'd think that the end of the world was coming. But wouldn't you know it, they've revised the forecast and now everything is fizzling out. I thought I was going to get to bust out the snow blower, now most of the area will get just an inch. So much for a winter wonderland!
As fascinating as meteorology is, being the weatherman would suck since you can't be right half of the time.
Or Detroit for that matter. Although I suspect you get enough lake effect to last you for a while.
We got an inch or so overnight with rain/freezing rain on top of it, so I came into work 30 minutes early just so I didn't have to deal with the nutcases on the road. It's bad enough I'll be driving home in heavy snow. We are under a heavy snow warning.
Let's see...
It's 8:40am and the snow is suppose to start in Washington at mid day. It's already snowing. Last week, all of the tv stations made a big, big , big deal about a couple of inches. It's all about ratings.
I can't stand TV weather reports anymore. Everything has to be sensationalized and made "extreme." Don't inflate the extremes of temperatures with silly things like "wind chill" and "heat index" We all know that wind makes the cold feel worse and that heat and humidity is uncomfortable.
I don't even care what the weather is anymore but if I really need to know I'll go to NOAA or something.
Well as it turns out, we did get a little snow overnight, but not enough to cause the road crews any drama (of course my street gets cleared last).
The problem here is that they'll say the sky is falling, but a lot of the time it's really just the far east side of town where that's actually happening. Due to the shape of the Erie coast, that's where the real lake effect snow happens the most when weather is following the standard west to east pattern. Those counties are under winter storm warnings, but I'm south of Cleveland, and I just get plain vanilla snow most of the time.
My engineering friends and I always joke about how much easier a job it would be to be a weatherman. I mean, if you are a weatherman and you get something wrong, the worst thing that could happen would be a moderate inconvenience. If engineers were wrong as often as weathermen, lots of people would die...often.
The science of meteorology and dynamics of the atmosphere are so complex, it would be make an engineer's head spin. Just look at the accuracy of forecasts for an idea of how complicated this stuff is (though it is so much better than it used to be). And to be fair, meteorologists often hit the nail on the head (Katrina anyone?) with no credit given. Unfortunately, the primary delivery of weather information is television news where news directors would much rather have a pretty/handsome journalist than someone with actual training (WEWS and WKYC, I'm looking at you).