EDITORIAL: Though technology has come a long way in the area of weather prediction, forecasts can still be unreliable.
Remember the good old days, when you would wake up in the morning and surprise, surprise there was a foot of snow on the ground?
Those were the days when we divined what tomorrow might bring by checking out the weather vane, the barometer and grandpa’s aching joints. Or, if we had one of those newfangled television sets, we could watch the weatherman, usually a kindly old gent who drew pretty pictures of a shining sun or a dark cloud on a crude map that looked vaguely like the region in which we lived. His prognostication was invariably about as reliable as the Farmer’s Almanac (or grandpa’s aching joints) but, hey, the last thing we expected was any semblance of accuracy in weather forecasting.
Today, all that has changed. We have satellites and radar and sophisticated computer forecasts and 24-hour weather channels on TV. We have colorful maps and storm simulators and digital readouts of everything from upper air and lower air temperatures to humidity, barometric pressure, dew points and UV indices. The weatherman or weatherwoman is a meteorologist with an alphabet soup of advanced degrees.
And the last thing we expect is any semblance of accuracy in weather forecasting.
OK, perhaps that is a little harsh. All the technological advances we’ve seen since the first satellites started going up in the late 1950s have certainly enabled us to observe and understand weather patterns a whole lot better than we could back in the old days. The experts and there are a whole lot more of them now than there were then have so much information at their beck and call that they can begin plotting the track of a high-pressure system or the movement of a blistering nor’easter a whole lot earlier than they could in the past.
But, in the end, how much difference does it make? Here in central New Jersey, on the basis of all the high-tech information the experts had been processing, we were bracing ourselves for the storm of the century. Supermarkets ran out of bread, milk and toilet paper. Hardware stores ran out of shovels. On Monday afternoon, schools in Hightstown and East Windsor were locked up tight. The acting governor declared a state of emergency.
And there was an inch of snow on the ground.
True, nobody ever said the storm was guaranteed to hit us Sunday night and continue into Monday. That was just the early prediction. Then it was postponed to Monday night, continuing into Tuesday. And nobody ever guaranteed we’d get up to 2 feet of snow. That was just the prediction early in the weekend. By Sunday, it was down to a foot or so. By Monday, it was down to 4 to 8 inches. Compared to two earlier storms that have hit us this winter, that’s a dusting.
We don’t mean to ridicule the folks who forecast the weather. They’re doing the best they can. Even with all the data available to them, forecasting is still an inexact science. Every now and then, we need a "weather event" like this to remind us just how inexact it is.
If the dreaded storm had struck with all its fury, it would have vindicated not only the forecasters but the media, in particular the New York and Philadelphia television stations. For it was they, even more than the weather experts, who hyped the "blizzard" with an unending barrage of news bulletins, Doppler updates, crawlers along the bottom of the screen and live reports from every transportation maintenance yard within a 100-mile radius of the center of the storm wherever that happens to be at any given hour.
Thanks mainly to them, a lot of the bread and milk we have in our kitchen is going to go bad in the next week or two. But there’s also a bright side: We’re pretty sure we have enough toilet paper to last until 2003.