Weatherpeople

They say the darndest things, don't they?  Sometimes I think I want to be a weatherwoman, just because it seems to me that I could say just about anything I wanted to, and I would still get paid nicely for it.

I could look out my window, see that it's raining, and turn to face the camera with my report that "it will be rainy today."  Or I could even skip the window part, and make up some crap like "it will be partly cloudy today."  Doesn't "partly cloudy" actually mean there are other parts?  Like it could really be partly sunny, or partly hailing, or partly becoming windy then rainy?  It so often sounds to me like they are simply pulling it out of their you-know-where.

I've been collecting some of the more puzzling comments that I've heard from the weatherpeople over the last several months or so, and I thought I'd share some of them with you.  Please be clear that I am not intending to weather-blog, i.e. talk about the current weather.  I thoroughly dislike and am bored reading blogs that start each day with a long chat about the current weather.  Weather just is.  We have always had weather, and we always will.  Instead, I am writing about some of the more amusing and puzzling weather statements made by the reporters.

1.  "It will be partly cloudy today."  I've already commented on this one.  Sure seems like a cop-out to me.  It means the weather reporter has no clue what will be happening today.

2.  It was "the kind of rain that makes animals start lining up in pairs."

3.  "Buffalo, New York had a brown Christmas this year."  Ew.

4.  They had "a flash drought in the Midwest."  How does an area get a flash drought?  I understand a flash flood is one that covers an area fast.  I also understand that a drought is brought on by an extended period of low rainfall.  So how then, does a flash drought happen?

5.  "A few storms may be capable of producing small to marginally severe hail."  Does marginally severe mean almost dangerous?  And if it's almost dangerous, it's not quite dangerous, so it's just regular hail?  So why not just say "the storms may produce some hail?"

                           

6.  "We've seen persistent high-amplitude weather patterns."  Huh?  When I think of amplitudes I think of sine and cosine curves.  Is the weather going up and down, and how wide are the weathers?

7.  A strip of northern Florida was classified as being in "exceptional drought."  I always thought being exceptional means being superior, in a good way, to the other things being compared.  I'm not sure I would use the worlds "exceptional" and "drought" together in the same sentence.  But there you have it - weatherpeople say what they want and get paid for it.

I like the following two weather predicting devices I have recently seen.  I think they both tell it as it is.  

I have a feeling they are also about as accurate as any of the weatherpeople I have heard.  

They just don't get paid as much.  

I hope you all have a partly sunny day (whatever that means).