Photo by Bogdan Dirică on Pexels
You’ll notice that I haven’t put the word “science” into the title of my blog post. I was never very good at math or statistics, and I still get confused about the precise meaning of the percentage chance of rain in any given forecast. Turns out, that percentage refers to “the statistical probability that a given point in a forecast area will receive at least 0.01” of precipitation in the specified time period,” according to WeatherStationAdvisor. It’s still all a bit confusing to me.
But, this weekend, and for a good portion of last week, weather forecasters were talking about a big Nor’easter that was going to wallop much of New England. I had a follow-up imaging appointment today, so as we made it through the weekend, the bombastic forecasts made me worry about being able to drive through the almost foot of snow they were forecasting.
The night before, we received an autocall from the town cancelling school for the day. Sigh. I was getting more and more worried about battling rush hour traffic in the middle of a snow storm. But, I thought, let me sleep on this and see what the morning brings.
Of course, as I woke up, there was not a single flake of snow on the ground. I was able to drive to my appointment with not a single problem or any traffic at all (maybe most people decided to work from home because of the awful weather forecast).
I follow a few meteorologists on TikTok, and I was trying the night before to get an accurate take on what my morning would be like. They could only speak in probabilities, and one meteorologist noted the amount of local knowledge that weather forecasts bring to their job, which allows them to be a better source of information than the proliferation of weather apps that just spew straight model data.
Still, despite the art that goes into making a forecast, these prognosticators were all wrong about this storm by quite a bit.
Makes me feel a little bit better about the mistakes that I let through in my daily blog!
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