Jerry Fuller - Commentary
Jerry Fuller – Commentary

This past snowstorm has highlighted, quite obviously, a major flaw in the way that the National Weather Service handles potentially severe weather.

Under federal regulations, the NWS has total authority to issue watches, warnings and advisories regarding potentially severe weather. Usually, these alerts contain a description on what the NWS believes will happen, such as some projected statistics and the like. The problem with this is that virtually every publicly forecasting meteorologist, or any service that provides weather reports, is morally (and in most cases, especially in the radio and television field, legally) required to relay these warnings. Although they aren’t required to read the warnings word-for-word once the initial banner goes across the screen, they generally have to include the key statistics in the forecasts.

For warnings, especially those on the smaller scales, this isn’t an issue; in fact, the direction and speed of a thunderstorm cell, along with estimated wind speeds, is crucial information to be disseminated to the public, and is only disputable in very rare circumstances. The real trouble comes with watches and advisories. Because most of these are forecast well in advance, there’s a bit of subjectivity, and a lot of uncertainty, in projecting what, for instance, the low-pressure mass that hit the Twin Tiers yesterday and today was going to produce in the realm of snowfall. The NWS put out a winter storm watch calling for a whopping 4 to 7 inches of snow. Being a discerning meteorologist, I was highly skeptical of this number. The snow was light and persistent synoptic snow (as opposed to the brief and intense lake-effect events that usually produce such high totals early in the season), the ground was warm and fairly moist, and surface temperatures were forecast to be above freezing (even if only marginally so). Though I originally had forecast the storm to miss us on Wednesday, that afternoon I revised my guess upward to 1 to 2 inches. I wasn’t alone in my assessment: Aaron Mentkowski, the meteorologist at WKBW-TV in Buffalo (and a fellow SUNY Oswego alumnus), was also calling for 1-2 inches for most of the Twin Tiers. However, because the Weather Service put out the bulletin for 4 to 7 inches, most of the news agencies were compelled to throw that number out there, overriding the better sense of the private-sector meteorologists. So, I get/see several messages on my Facebook account talking about how they said we were going to get 4 to 7 inches, and whether or not they were right. I had to set the record straight telling folks that it’s “not going to happen.”

Sure enough, it snowed all day Thursday, all night Thursday night, and much of Friday. Despite that, nothing stuck to the ground all day Thursday, and only when nightfall came did we get any significant accumulation from it… and it was just as I had forecast: 1 to 2 inches. By Friday afternoon, even though the snow was still falling, most of the snow on the ground had melted.

Memo to the National Weather Service: Be more careful when you issue winter storm watches like that, and use some common sense. You guys are professionals, so let’s see some more realistic numbers when you put out a bulletin like that. I don’t expect it to totally match the private-sector numbers, but remember: your forecasts impact theirs, and their forecasts impact the public as a whole, in many cases, moreso than yours.

~Jerry