Hey, Remember When the National Weather Service Forecast It Would Be a Really Warm Winter?
It’s cold out there, with people being forced to head to bookstores to find tinder. There is snow everywhere. Parts of Boston are flooding. In other words, it’s a hellscape, or a “bomb cyclone” if you prefer.
This sucks, but it happens. It’s called weather and winter tends to be the most brutal season of the year.
Many people, however, were caught unprepared for just how intense this season would be. Perhaps they were lulled into a false sense of confidence by government agencies tasked with monitoring this sort of thing.
Whatever would give me that idea? Oh, you know, the fact that The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote in October that this winter was going to feature “warmer-than-normal conditions.”
They had maps and everything! They used big words. It looked so legit, and now I’m sitting here with only one, torn pair of long johns to my name.
Seriously, though, weather forecasting is not an exact science. The NOAA — a government agency within the Department of Commerce, which is also under the umbrella of the National Weather Service — had every reason to believe this was going to be a mild winter, and even they admitted that weather is “difficult to predict more than one to two weeks in advance.”
It may still turn out to be a mild winter, median wise. A stray, and I can’t believe I’m typing this again, “bomb cyclone” may not actually impact the severity of the season taken as a whole. We’ll see in March, once the mathematicians do their thing.
At any rate, this doesn’t exactly help weather forecasters with their shaky, to put it mildly, reputations. Your move, Roker.
[image via screenshot]
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