Meteorology

The Great Winter Ice Storm of 2015 was a bust.  I have had more ice in my whiskey glass than there was on the ground this morning, and evidently our local weather weenies are catching flak over their icy-apocalypse weather forecasting.  As well they should, they blew it.  One local personality has his feelings hurt, and he posted on his facebook page.

As many of you know, I like to be as open and honest with my followers as possible. Some are upset about the lack of a significant ice storm. If you try and nail it, you will miss. If you overshoot it, people will be upset for it not happening. If you under-prepare people, you will have many accidents and potential loss of life. That's why as a Meteorologist I do not forecast out of concern for my batting average. I believe the key is to save lives and keep people safe. At the end of the day, if I prepared people for the worst possible scenario, I did my job. There will always be more days of school and we can always get more salt, but one life lost due to unpreparedness is a tragedy. I would like to commend DOTD, school boards, and parish/city officials for their great job in preparation.

It's simple, dude, you blew it.  Anyone can predict the weather in August, but predicting it in February might be hard.  You're going to be wrong a lot, which means you should study your craft.

I'm no meteorologist, but I have been studying the weather for a lot of years, looking at the same maps you look at, and I didn't see ice in the forecast.  I saw normal winter weather, with some possibility of ice on the bridges, but that's why DOTD leaves those signs up all year.  The ones that say that bridges ice before roadways.

More importantly, Mr. Weatherman, it's not your job to prepare people, it's your job to predict the weather.  You do that through models and records and you take your best guess.  So, write this one down.  With conditions like we had, we didn't get ice.  Next time, you should be able to look at your records and know that with similar conditions, we're not going to get ice, then you can get it right.

But, by all means, don't try to be asocial scientist.  Be a hard scientist and go with the data.  Any damned fool can pretend to be a social scientist, but what we need are competent weathermen.  Try to be one.