Starting sometime Tuesday morning we began to hear from our local weatherfolk about a big Nor’easter destined to slam into New England beginning around mid-day on Wednesday. The usual and customary panic ensued (even here in the frost-hardened North): Runs on shovels at Home Depot and 2% milk at Cumberland Farms. Schools and events cancelled near and far. Boston St. Petersburg
It was wicked scary.
All five local weatherfolk stood in front of big, colorful, computer-generated maps showing the track of the storm. Round here, we were supposed to get about eight inches (and maybe a foot), with snow beginning in the early afternoon and going all night.
As it turned out, the snow began around mid-day, lasted a few hours and then stopped. Maybe we got an inch, maybe two. Not even close.
What happened?
Local weatherguy Pete Bouchard said on his blog, under an article entitled “Stink, Stank, Stunk”:
Yes I know you'll never watch/trust me again. But I also know that everyone called for roughly the same amounts, the same timing, and same call to arms. No one's got God holding on line one. While I know there's nothing to appease the anger, the disgust and the shame, I also know I can't change what I can't control. I also know you're entitled to your opinion of meteorologists, our forecasts, and the profession.
So, as a person who depends on computers and computer modeling for lots of things I know about, and probably lots of things I don’t know about, what the heck happened? I don’t for a minute think that Pete Bouchard was outside looking at the sky or measuring the wind from the roof of the TV station or, for that matter, actually outside for more than 15 minutes in the last 24 hours; he was in front of a computer terminal all day.
Isn’t there a Super Duper Cray Weather Computer at some national weather lab somewhere, a computer with fifty years of minute-by-minute, meticulous weather data stored, updated constantly, and adjusted for actual results? In fact, in the year A.D. 2010, shouldn’t a weatherfolk be able to predict the difference in snowfall three feet from my house vs. six feet from my house under any conceivable scenario?
What’s that, you say? Mother Nature is unpredictable? Isn’t that the point of computer models? Can’t I run a million scenarios and figure out what’s going to happen? Can’t I adjust when the temperature is 32 in Roanoke vs. 31, and the wind is coming from Montreal
Come to think of it, aren’t the jet airplanes that I fly designed by computer models? Aren’t designer drugs modeled on computers? Can’t I lose tons and tons of money betting against computer models on Sundays? Not to state the obvious, but aren't the brakes on my car run through a computer model or two? How about that roller coaster the kids make me go on in the summer—wasn’t that designed with a, gulp, computer model?
I’m glad we only got two inches of snow. I’m glad the weatherfolk apologized. I’m glad the sun will come out tomorrow (. . .bet your bottom dollar).
But after that, I’m kinda nervous.
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