Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Ol' Man Winter

Today was on track to be another glorious late fall day - the sun was shining, temperatures were in the 50s, it was calm to breezy. Then Ol' Man Winter opened his gaping maw and turned on the wind machines. By the time Molly and I got out for our walk, the temperature was dropping 8 degrees a hour and the wind was blowing to drop the wind chill well below freezing. It caught me by surprise, but in retrospect it should not have. The weather forecast for tonight and tomorrow involves snow and large northern cold front settling in. As a consequence, it is supposed to be in the low 20s tomorrow and then drop into single digits as the night closes in. Winter is supposedly on its way. Now all we have to do is see if the weather critters are right.

Speaking of weather critters, am I the only one thinking of writing a "truth in weather critters" application? Since the weather forecasts generally come out in 7 day blocks  and are re-issued each day with new (and often a very different forecast for a given day), my thought is to capture the weather forecasts so one could have a little applet that not only gave you the prediction for tomorrow, but the associated trend line in how the weather critters are changing their predictions. I realize that if you live in SoCal, this is utterly boring since the forecast is always sunny except for those ten days a year when it says partially cloudy and the one day a decade when it says snow. But how about those who live where there is real weather. Doesn't it irk you to have the weather critters change their forecasts after you have made your plans. Don't you wish you could hold their feet to the fire? I sure do sometimes. Maybe even add a retrospective feature to show what the weather was and how close or far the weather critters actually were.



Time to get back to checking on the batch of turkey soup that the last of the holiday bird is fleshing out. Think cold and snow and we'll see if the weather critters get it right.

5 comments:

  1. Down here in S. Central TX they are predicting snow flurries. SNOW FLURRIES! That does NOT happen around here! Of course if it does happen it will be at 3am in the morning and will be gone by the time the sun comes up, but I'm hoping....

    ReplyDelete
  2. If we have family plans in a neighboring city, I'll check accuweather's hourly forcast. Unfortunately since I do the checking, my feet get held to the fire by everyone else in attendance--I think I am floundering at about 50% weather prediction accurate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's raining and 42 degrees in Georgia today. I'm not enjoying it (haha)

    ReplyDelete
  4. We got that cold front her in Iowa this morning. Brrrrr!

    It was still nice enough outside last night to go for a run, but the wind picked up while I was out. It's blowing crazy hard today.

    Meteorologists really do get it wrong a lot - especially around here. But oh well, it keeps things interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Right now my Weather Channel desktop application is making thunder noises -- apparently there has been a major thunderstorm going on for hours here, but ummmm....WC is wrong.

    ReplyDelete

You know you want to ... so just do it!!!

Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin