An Open Letter to Weather Underground, Weatherbug, etc*:
Irradiated by Stingray
I’m not sure what reality you’re dealing with regarding the weather in Los Alamos, NM, but clearly it is not the same universe as the rest of us have to deal with. For the past few weeks, temperature predictions, and worse, observations, have ranged from 10 to 25 degrees below actual (as I type, you report a *modified* temperature accounting for heat index of 82f, while the actual unmodified temperature currently sits at a cheerfully skull-boiling 95F). Worse, every single day has carried a thunderstorm icon and the promise of a slight chance of showers. While this is technically true in the same sense that I have a slight chance to win the lottery or to be struck by lightning, given as the only atmospheric moisture comes from my own exhalations, this seems just a skosh optimistic. I can only imagine your crack meteorologists other hobbies, such as eating hamburgers in front of people dying of starvation, or using the last of the fresh water in the life raft to rinse your socks because they feel dirty.
Current reporting claims 45% cloud cover. Please, for the sake of us all, open the window and let the bong smoke out, you’ve clearly mistaken it for atmospheric conditions again, as the only thing covering 45% of the sky at the moment is heat, along with more heat and a side of dry. The remaining 55% happens to be covered by the same thing, but small details like that are easy to miss in the fever of inventing fictional climates. I imagine this fantasy Los Alamos which has been the subject of your reports and forecast for some time now to be quite a nice location, and while I’d like to consider the notion you’re merely reporting on what the weather will be in late September, instead of the end of June, I’m not sure I quite buy that level of prognostication.
I’m aware that most of this “reporting” and forecasting is the result of remote instrument monitoring. Isn’t technology wonderful? The same set of kit that lets me vent my frustration over having sweated through a dozen days of 105f being cheerfully misreported as the mid-80s lets another group sit cheerfully remote to read mis-calibrated sensors and copy and paste the same “Well, it’s almost monsoon season so I guess it might rain” forecast in day after day giving ever delightful false hope and spirit-raising disappointment as the cloudless sky (45% coverage!) bakes the last lingering shreds of sanity from our minds, at a perfectly accurate….let me check the readings here…. purple-bananna degrees. Kelvin.
Tomorrow’s forecast: Snow and earthquakes! How much snow? About a towel.
Please, check the sensors or at least call someone in the zip code and ask if there are any clouds in the sky.
*In direct response to challenge, this complaint contains no words which would not be acceptable in a family-friendly venue. Suck on that, bitchcock.
June 28th, 2012 at 12:11 pm
I use weatherspark. Love it. Never looked back.
June 28th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
It was so much easier when I lived in Key West. Same weather report every day.
High in the 80’s. Low in the 70’s. Chance of rain.
Most common reason for a local weather guesser to quit? Boredom.
Now I live in North Carolina and the locals say that if you don’t like the weather just stick around for a couple of hours. It will likely change.
June 28th, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Locals say that everywhere, Knitebane. Only place I ever saw it true was in the rocky mountains, east of the Great Divide.
June 28th, 2012 at 3:23 pm
Bwahahahahahaa! That reminds me of the trouble I’ve had with the Accuweather app. I look across the tiny screen promising a 0-percent chance of rain, out the window into the current flash flooding. I deleted that one pretty quick.
June 28th, 2012 at 4:29 pm
I lived in Buffalo for 6 years.
It broke me of looking at the weather map, especially in winter.
Two reasons. 1) Any big storm you’ll hear about just talking with people. And 2) Any *any* bit of snowfall will vary by a huge amount on a very localized area.
The lake effect was amazing. You could go from one neighborhood and have two inches of snow, drive to another and have two feet.
June 28th, 2012 at 6:46 pm
Ah yes, weatherguessers… 50% of being right is considered GOOD… I use the open window method!
June 29th, 2012 at 7:09 am
I always find it interesting that most predictions are only half right from day to day, yet these are the same people who claim they can tell what the weather will be like fifty years from now.
June 29th, 2012 at 4:07 pm
The footnote pleases me.
June 30th, 2012 at 7:03 am
It always amuses me to go look at the climate charts of remote islands in Wikipedia:
The Falklands, for instance have an average January high of 55 degrees and an average July low of 30 degrees. Chatham Island has a daily mean temperature that fluctuates barely a dozen degrees over the course of a year.
Meanwhile, here in Indianapolis, with its “humid continental” climate, we experienced a forty-seven degree temperature swing between Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon.
June 30th, 2012 at 8:02 am
Yes, they are interpolating your conditions and forecast from some site twenty miles away with no allowance for altitude.
At least the the NOAA lets you bookmark your location, and I think that their interpolations are better.
June 30th, 2012 at 8:45 am
Weatherbug at least has a place where you can post photos of current weather. When they are being wrong-tastic, especially when they are advising “overcast” or “snowing” on a scorching fall day, do that. I think you can even tag them. I need not inspire Stingray of all people for the possible uses of that little feature.
June 30th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
So that’s where our AF weather guys go! I always wondered.
July 2nd, 2012 at 4:20 am
As I already said over at Tams place, we here in the UK have a state of the art weather forecasting service, which is never wrong:
http://lh3.ggpht.com/-dmpMLnzh9vk/T-waI8-v7GI/AAAAAAAADao/n7wr65o5vwc/s1600-h/stone%25255B3%25255D.png
July 2nd, 2012 at 6:22 am
Amen. Last year they kept forecasting highs in the mid 90s with a 12% chance of moistness over here in the Texas and OK Panhandles. It got so that the local guys were just shaking their heads and adding a few degrees, because “average” had nothing to do with the reality on the ground.
True Story from fifteen years ago. I was flying in IA-SD-ND-MN and got caught one very long December day by utterly unforecast snow squalls. Several months later I happened to chat up one of the aviation weather folks in SD and I mentioned that messy day. She shook her head and said that they had gotten so many complaints, cries for help, and other such that the supervisor finally called the main regional National Weather Service forecast office and told them to open a window, stick their heads out of it, and amend the forecast so the aviation weather people could pass it on to the airplane drivers!