What is it about weather forecasting that makes it so pathetically inaccurate? Perhaps accuracy is too much to expect, but there’s no doubt something vaguely relating to expected weather conditions would be preferable to the great rash of blatant lies that forecasters regularly dish up.
A Thursday or so ago the forecasters on all the English televison stations were in dire form, issuing solemn warnings about the weather they predicted would befall southern England the following morning. Explaining the looming meteorological cataclysm, every one of them used expressive body language to add emphasis to satellite images of a vast cold front sweeping across the North Atlantic. There was much shrugging, head-shaking and grim smiling. Winds of up to 136kph were guaranteed, accompanied by sleet and drenching. People were warned to check up on flight arrivals and departures, train cancellations. You would have thought it was time to start filling sandbags. On one TV station the approaching tempest graduated to become a separate news story. Motorists were advised to make only necessary journeys and warned to keep clear of motorways. A weather expert was winched into the studio to discuss in an earnest voice the blame that might be attributed to global warming. He didn’t get quite as far as saying that United States President George W Bush was personally responsible for this particular low-pressure system, but he certainly hinted at that.
The next morning southern England dawned to cloudy skies and drizzle. By 9am this had tempered to broken cloud with shafts of welcome sun breaking through. Ninety minutes later the sky was blue from horizon to horizon, the temperature was mildly cool and the gentlest of zephyrs brushed the trees. With foolish optimism I watched the weather forecasters, in the wild hope that they would explain. Only one bothered, dismissing the whole thing by blaming the cold front for having passed by ”a bit south of where we expected”. Furious weather conditions had indeed occurred, he assured us, but safely out at sea.
There are many in aviation who will remember the late Keith Hayward, a South African Air Force and South African Airways pilot of copious experience and hours. (He was also the fastest Rand Daily Mail crossword-solver of all time. On the occasions I flew as his co-pilot, my primary duty after take-off was to read out the clues and fill in the immediate answers.) Hayward used to refer to the meteorological office as the science fiction department, saying that in all his 30 000-plus hours of flying, he had not known them to be, at best, more than 5% accurate. ”And that they did by getting the date right.”
But Hayward did agree that there was a notable exception, a forecaster based at what was then DF Malan airport in Cape Town. For the life of me I cannot remember his name, but he was something of hangar legend. He had great distrust for anything but the most basic of meteorological instrumentation; a thermometer and an ancient barometer were about all he respected. The rest was a wet finger stuck out of the window. His 24-hour landing forecasts were usually accurate to within a degree in temperature, a knot or two in wind speed. He was not ”touched” with some prophetic muse. For him it was all experience, something in the bones.
All of which leads to the obvious question: why is it that the more ”leading edge” the technology applied to weather forecasting, the less reliable the predictions become? For every new weather satellite whirling around the planet, for every computer dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of the information the satellite beams down, there is a detectable diminution in the correctness of the forecasts. If meteorologists were in some other profession their sheer unreliability would have them out on the streets inside a week of signing on. If doctors were this inaccurate the crematoria would be having fire sales.
But then, in those days of the wet finger out the window, there weren’t any El Niño effects to confuse things. The hole in the ozone hadn’t formed, excessive methane from cattle-farting had not yet contaminated the mesosphere and computers were in their infancy. The weathermen had far fewer excuses for their creative excesses. As a result, they tended to concentrate on the job at hand.
What would make it a lot easier to bear would be a little humility on the part of those deputised to misinform the public on behalf of the weather bureaus. For a start, they could be taught to apologise when they are shown to have got something badly wrong.
Here’s something you’ll never be in danger of hearing on the television forecast: ”We’re sorry we told you it would be fine to go to the beach today. As it turned out, we were completely wrong because it poured with rain and you had to put up with having the kids inside all day. By mistake, we got the readings mixed up with those for the same date in 1988.”
”We were wrong then, too.”