Weather reporter. Prognosticator. Meteorologist. What a difficult job. We seem so very bad about blaming the weatherman (weather woman, weather girl, weather person) when the weather doesn’t turn out as predicted.
If the forecast says “Sunny” and you plan an outdoor party, and thunderclouds crop up and your event is spoiled, who gets the blame? The weather guy. If the weather lady says “Tomorrow? Definitely snow!” and it doesn’t snow? Well, I guess if you live in Chicago, you’re happy there’s no more snow coming. If you live in Central Texas, you might be a little sad. Snowfall is a rare and beautiful gift to us. If you’re a school kid and snow was predicted and it doesn’t come, you’ll be really angry, because you thought you were going to have a day off school, and you could sleep late, play in the snow all morning, have some hot chocolate, and miss that algebra/history/spelling test that you hadn’t really studied for. Who gets the blame? The weather folks.
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- Kevin with his first snowman. And this is the ordinary size of most snowmen here in Central Texas.
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- Some neighbors made this gargantuan (for us) snowman a couple of years ago. You can tell by the lack of snow in the yard (and the back yard looked this empty also) and the amount of yard debris in the old fellow, that they used pretty much all the available snow, from their yard and a couple of other yards, too.
A few years ago, two competitive television stations here got new weather reporting…um…things. One got a new system at the station, and the other had gotten plugged into a big hotshot weather center someplace (it was years ago, sorry I can’t be more exact). They had, for days, talked about their new forecasting systems and how they were going to be able to do so much better a job of predicting the weather and how good it would be for us, and sure enough, in just a couple of weeks they warned us about a huge cold front coming our way. It would bring snow and ice and bitter temperatures the next weekend.
OO-oo-oo. We were pretty excited. I bought some extra supplies and envisioned a Saturday and Sunday of being curled up in the living room with the gas logs burning and warming us up, drinking hot chocolate and watching movies. It was a bust. The weather guys were wrong, wrong, wrong. Both of them. The system collapsed (or fell apart, or just got weary and gave up), and the weekend was quite pleasant for a Central Texas winter day-not too cold and actually sunny. Things were normal, and we were irritated that our cozy weekend didn’t happen.
I realized that what the new, fancy, fabulous equipment did was to make the weather people aware of huge systems that were probably out there all the time and usually broke up before they got anywhere near us.
I do really appreciate that improved weather analysis helps people know about upcoming disasters so they can be better prepared. Even if those disasters don’t happen, it’s far better to have extra jugs of water and food left over, than to need them and not have them. And I suppose it’s my fault for thinking that the weather forecasters are clairvoyant, always knowing, magically, what’s in store for us. They’re just like the rest of us, doing the best they can with their training and the information available.
We should try to remember to thank them when they’re right.
He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.
Matthew 16:2-3 (NRSV)
It’s interesting to me that this weather adage was well known in biblical times. Here’s the explanation for this phenomena.