Leave the meteorologists alone. Contrary to popular opinion, predicating the weather is difficult in spite of the vast knowledge and computing power available to modern day forecasters.
After the predicted Snowpocalypse came and went in the tri-Sstate area as a dud, the locals became restless and proclaimed meteorologists the latest village idiots. What was forecast as a storm of the century turned out to be a run of the mill nor’easter.
The technical challenges faced by meteorologists are not well understood by the general public. Predicting the weather is not a matter of insufficient information or, even to a lesser degree, a lack of computing power.
When it comes to understanding the physics principles governing our weather, from the behavior of a gas under different temperature and pressures to the large-scale motion described by fluid mechanics, climate and weather scientists have a good handle on the short-term effects on weather.
While it may sound ridiculous, the meteorologist is successful at telling you what the weather is right now, and that window of correctness has expanded to a few days.
But there are other factors that make the job of predicting daily weather far in advance essentially impossible.
The global weather pattern is a nonlinear system with strong chaos theory effects. In 1961, Edward Lorenz noticed that when he reran a weather prediction model with a rounded off value, it led to a completely different weather outcome. He later dubbed this phenomena “the butterfly effect” and it presents a daily challenge to weather forecasters.
This is where meteorologists arrive at their percentage-based weather forecasts. They take the given conditions and slightly modify each parameter thousands of times. They pass these variations through their models and tally up what comes out.
The final step to check their work is to verify that on, let’s say, 20 percent of the days they said there would be a 20 percent chance it rained that in fact it did rain 20 percent of those days.
Now yes, some meteorologists take liberties with the weather. They become bombastic personalities and sometimes it does seem like The Weather Channel has become the Fox News of weather forecasts. Weathermen will also lean toward wetter forecasts because people would rather it didn’t rain when they said it would, rather than vice versa.
Meteorologists play an essential role in our daily lives and saves thousands of lives annually, but only if we heed their warnings and play it safe. Too often they are correct, as in the case of Superstorm Sandy, and people blow off the severity of the forecasts.
So, the next time you bash the weatherman and say that you could do a better job, take a step back and appreciate the difficulty of their profession.