don’t panic

Despite what the rest of the world thinks about SoCal weather, I think a perpetual summer sucks. But I’ve already complained about that elsewhere. What really chaps my hide about our weather is the complete dunderheads we have predicting it.

Consider that about 95% of the year, our daily weather forecast is:

“Early morning cloudiness, clearing to sunny and hot in the afternoon. Highs from 75 to 85 with lows of 55.”

The rest of the year, it’s:

“Cloudy with a 30% chance of rain. Highs of 60 to 70, cooling in the evening to a low of 55.”

OR

“Santa Ana winds bringing temperatures above a hundred in some parts of the county.”

We also get a random dash of days the rest of the country would call, “rainy,” giving us a grand total of about 6 inches of precipitation a year.

What this means, is that without a single rain gauge, doppler radar scan, or satellite uplink, our weathermen could say the exact same thing all year round, and STILL be right on the money 95% of the year.

That being the case, how can they POSSIBLY be so damn wrong as much as they are?!

I have this nifty little utility on my computer that places a little icon at the top of my desktop showing me a representation of the current weather outside along with the temperature. It’s called WeatherPop, and it polls the data from a number of places, including the government’s own weather service that most of the newspapers use, and it does so every fifteen minutes. Obviously, the National Weather Service relies on instrumentation and reporting from local weather stations to collect it’s data, and the actual forecasting is probably a combination of local and national systems, both automated and manual.

WeatherPop is a menu icon, such that you click on it and a menu listing drops down showing you a whole mess of interesting weather data, like dew point, humidity, and barometric pressure (why I need to know those, I can’t guess, but there it is). It also has a four day forecast.

Mind you, those four days are TODAY, tomorrow and the following two days. This is almost always the same info you get on the six o’clock news, only without the goofy guy with sections of the blue screen radar image in his mis-colored neck tie showing you over and over and OVER how the animated high pressure zone with all the rain is going to JUST miss us yet again. And the worst part is that he will be WRONG.

We get something like a dozen good days of rain a year, and out of those twelve, the local weather reporters usually only hit about three with any useful accuracy. I mean, what good is it to say, “increasing cloudiness, with showers tomorrow morning,” if the rain doesn’t hit you until late the following night? Or worse, it hits early.

This season was nothing short of laughable. We had some really outstanding downpours (for SoCal), but half the time, I would be sitting in front of my computer and the little WeatherPop icon would show a little icon of a sun, and yet, when I would look out the window, it appeared as though God was having second thoughts about his promise not to drown us all again. What’s that all about?! Or I dress my child in full rain gear because the news is saying that an absolutely mammoth storm is just about to come crashing ashore to drench us, only to have her come home hot and sweaty because said storm turned into a few sprinkles at the coast which hit two days late.

Gah! What’s the point of having a weather forecast if I stand a FAR better chance of getting it right just by sticking my head out a window and staring at the sky?

I realize that our weather guys (and gals) don’t get a whole lot of practice when it comes to actual precipitation, but you’d think that they’d try extra hard to get it right out of sheer boredom. Oh well… (more…)