Rational Action

Ever since I developed an unhealthy obsession with weather forecasting freshman year of high school, I’ve kept my eye out for websites that would help me play meteorologist. To date, the most useful source has been weather.gov, which offers “forecast discussions” for every region in the country. These discussions are flat text files containing a few paragraphs of weather commentary; they are written by the National Weather Service meteorologists who create the official forecasts. Weather tends to be a bit mundate, and the discussions generally reflect this tendency.

Which brings us to the latest discussion for the New York City area. I count two — that’s right, two — exclamation points!! Then again, when a forecast lists total snow accumulation of 12 to 18 inches as one of its predictions, an exclamation point or two might be warranted.

OVERALL...EXPECT THINGS TO GET RATHER WILD LATE SAT AFTERNOON AND
ESPECIALLY THE EVENING. 35 MICROBARS IN THE BEST DENDRITE GROWTH
ZONE. THIS SHOULD GENERALLY EQUATE TO AT LEAST A COUPLE HOURS OF
2-4" PER HOUR SNOWS WITH EMBEDDED THUNDER. THERE MAY BE TOO MUCH
SHEAR IN THE COLUMN TO GET SLANTWISE CONVECTION TO REMAIN ORGANIZED
AND RESULT IN NASTY DISCRETE BANDING. USUALLY WANT UNIDIRECTIONAL
PROFILE FOR THAT SORT OF STUFF. STILL...SNOWFALL RATES WILL BE HEAVY
ENOUGH BETWEEN 21Z AND 06Z! 

WANT TO GET WORD OUT NOW. 3-5 FT DEPARTUES IN
WRN SOUND LOOK LIKELY AROUND 12Z SUNDAY. WATCH OUT EATONS NECK AND
ASHAROKEN!

GOOD THING THIS STORM WILL BE HAPPENING OVER THE WEEKEND.
OTHERWISE...WE'D BE LOOKING AT MORE WIDESPREAD PROBLEMS. FOR THOSE
SNOW LOVERS OUT THERE...ENJOY...I KNOW YOU'VE BEEN WAITING A LOOOONG
TIME. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2005 at 6:26 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Ever since I developed an unhealthy obsession with weather forecasting freshman year of high school, I’ve kept my eye out for websites that would help me play meteorologist. To date, the most useful source has been weather.gov, which offers “forecast discussions” for every region in the country. These discussions are flat text files containing a few paragraphs of commentary by the National Weather Service meteorologists who create the official forecasts. Weather tends to be a bit mundate, so the forecast discussions are often dry, to say the least.

Which brings us to the latest discussion for the New York City area. I count two — that’s right, two — exclamation points!! Then again, maybe

From what I can tell, the data available on weather.gov is the same data that most local forecasters use to make their own predictions, so these discussion files are probably

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2005 at 6:18 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.