I am disappointed. Though I knew the weather on the East
Coast would be different from what I was used to when I moved to Maryland, I hadn’t
quite realized just how different it
would be. I had expected fewer tornadoes, and maybe even fewer thunderstorms,
but I wasn’t really prepared for such mildness in the winter. Having grown up
in the Midwest, a winter with less than five inches of snow was really no
winter at all. When my facebook and twitter feeds were flooded with information
about snow in Boston, Kansas City, Lubbock, Long Island, and various other
places across the country where I did not have the pleasure of being, I often
responded with sentiments of a sad and/or jealous nature. Naturally, you might
imagine my joy and hopeful anticipation when it was said earlier this week that
the DC-Baltimore area would be blanketed on Wednesday, give or take a day, with
a nice, thick, layer of snow.
Well, the weather gnomes had different ideas. As if to mock
us for cancelling school, closing government offices, and advising people to
hunker down and stay home whilst the skies unleashed their fury and hurled
thousands, nay trillions!, of snow things down upon our weary heads, it became
obvious by 1:00 PM EST that DC’s “Snowquester” might not even involve much snow
at all. Sure, some areas west of the city saw copious amounts of Grade A
snowman making, heart attack inducing snow, the DC-Baltimore area was dealt
some early morning slush and surface temperatures that, wish as I might, refused
to dip below freezing.
I’d had my doubts. The temperature yesterday topped out
yesterday in the upper 40s, the temperature on Thursday was also forecast to be
above 40F, and the rational part of my mind was saying “There’s no way that we’re
going to get much of any snow with this...” A coworker of mine even left work
on Tuesday doubting we’d get as much as 5 millimeters (because he’s French). The
emotional part of my mind, however, was hoping against hope that somehow the
cold would prevail and we’d get at least 5 or so inches (because I’m American) of
snowfall to soften the harshness of such a mild, uneventful DC winter. My hopes
were of course buoyed by forecasts from weather models, like the NAM, which was
spitting out forecasts on Tuesday that suggested the DC-Baltimore area would receive
a substantial amount of snowfall.
These forecasts, as we now know, were actually pretty wrong
as far as the DC area was concerned. They didn’t take into account the
possibility of the surface temperature just not being cold enough for any
appreciable snow. And the mistake was a costly one. A large portion of the
DC-Baltimore area essentially shut down in preparation for this excessive accumulation
of snow that didn’t end up accumulating. In doing a brief post-mortem of the
event, The *gulp*Weather Channel mentioned that the model to perform the best
for this Snowquester snowstorm in the DC area was, in fact, the ECMWF’s model, while
American models lagged behind with varying degrees of wrong-ness. Granted, no
model forecast is ever going to be 100% correct, 100% of the time (or even any percent
of the time). It’s just not possible. In order to be useful, weather models
have to approximate atmospheric processes, simply because atmospheric processes
cannot be PRECISELY represented by equations, and because these processes are
so complex and contain so many variables that it would be impossible to model
them with absolute accuracy. And despite the snowfall forecast for the DC area
being pretty much a complete bust, the models did do a decent job of telling us
that there would be a storm and that some regions in Maryland, Virginia, and
West Virginia would get a substantial amount of wintery precipitation.
I can’t help but think of the irony of this storm. Just
earlier this week, the nation’s Congress refused to put aside their frivolous
differences and work (for once this decade) on some sort of compromise to avoid
the major budget cuts outlined in The Sequestration, and now a poor forecast
has hit the nation’s capitol and likely cost a substantial amount of money.
What’s morbidly funny is the fact that these kinds of losses will only be
avoided if the National Weather Service and our weather models can be improved,
and if the weather data from satellites and terrestrial-based sources that we
rely on to make our forecasts aren’t taken away from us. We busted. We busted
because our short range, high resolution models need more development, and
because the computing sources at the disposal of our National Weather Service
probably aren’t currently good enough to even run better models. ECMWF arguably
has the best weather model out there, and it’s arguably improving at a pace our
operational forecasters don’t have the resources to match.
Americans: Isn’t it tragic that our weather, which is amongst
the most volatile and diverse weather in the world, is better modeled by the Europeans
than it is by any American-made model? Isn’t it tragic that we have the
knowledge and talent in this country to vastly improve our National Weather Service’s
forecast skill, but that we’re hard pressed to find an opportunity to do it?
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