One of our followers asked a very good question over at SWAS_Blog today. She wanted to know why we didn’t put forecasts in our tweets. Truth of the matter is, we just retransmit observations and warnings that the National Weather Service puts out in the public domain. While there are some short-term forecasts included within those feeds, they are not globally available, and they are “short-term forecasts”.
The fact is, even if forecasts were available for each and every location, chances are we would not put them into the feeds. Why on earth do you want a full forecast sent to your cell phone while you’re driving down Interstate 590? What I would want in that situation was some sort of heads up that the weather is turning really ugly where I am, or in the direction I’m heading. The same would be true if I was working on my computer at the home, or at the office.
The forecast you get from your local television station every night has a tendency to deviate, sometimes drastically from their projections of what your weather will be like tomorrow. If you have been paying attention, our weather has been changing; tornadoes touching down around Christmas time, and tornado watches in extreme northern New England have not been the norm over the last 150 years.
It doesn’t really matter which side of the global warming argument you choose to take, no matter what is causing these changes, they are happening whether we want them to or not, and this means more volatility in our weather. A complete weather forecast for the next 24 hours sent by anyone to your cell phone is at best viewed as a given percentage of a possibility, not a certainty. In this volatile and ever-changing climate we now live in, the bizarre has become the norm, and rapid changes are common, and that percentage keeps shrinking .
Observations are your first notice, call them a trip wire if you will, that things are changing outside your window. Watches and warnings let you know that things have changed, and not for the better. Short-term forecasts are a head’s up that in a few hours conditions are going to change on you. These are the foundations of what we put into our feeds, not what the next three days are going to look like.
The last hundred and 150 years have been one of the calmest weather periods in the history of this planet. Those days are long gone now, and they took with them the stable climate we lived in, as well as one heck of an easy job for a meteorologist. You need to pay attention to weather observations and weather warnings more than you ever did before. You need to use multiple sources to monitor these changing conditions. SWAS is one of those sources. Use all of them wisely and stay safe.
-gisher