Being a weather geek of sorts, I'm well aware that forecasting is an uncertain science. It's about probabilities and models, not mathematical precision.
All I ask is that professional weather forecasters recognize when they can be wrong, and communicate that to the public as clearly as possible.
Which Mark Nelsen, the main KPTV weather guy at Portland's Channel 12, failed to do Friday night, the day before today's winter storm was to hit Oregon. This annoyed me.
After all, on Thursday I'd written this blog post: "Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct." It started out with:
I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick.
Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes!
I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge).
I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.
Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.
That hope came true. With a bit over an hour left until the NWS Winter Storm Warning expires tonight, our home in rural south Salem has gotten about 1 1/2 inches of snow and quite a bit of sleet in the form of tiny ice pellets. Freezing rain accumulation was just about zero.
Which fit with this portion of the Thursday afternoon version of the Winter Storm Warning:
That forecast was right on, by and large. Salem, in the central Willamette Valley, got mostly snow and a small amount of freezing rain. Now, the Friday version of the NWS Winter Storm Warning did have a forecast for higher freezing rain amounts in our area, a quarter of an inch to half an inch.
This worried me, but I figured that since Salem was on the borderline of the freezing rain area, chances were we'd get closer to .25/inch than .50/inch. Bad, yet not horrible.
However, Friday night my wife and I watched the 11 pm news on KPTV. We've been doing this most nights since DirecTV got into a dispute with the owner of KGW and took Channel 8 off the air. That was our favorite weather forecast. We enjoyed Mark Nelsen's forecasts on KPTV too, though.
That was when Nelsen went way overboard on KPTV's First Alert Weather Day schtick. For he said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021.
Well, that was when our home was without electricity for twelve freaking days. My wife was shocked. I told her that an inch of freezing rain was way more than what the National Weather Service was forecasting, so I didn't think what Nelsen said would come true.
Of course, it didn't. However, that didn't stop me from lying in bed Friday night worrying about how we'd cope with another lengthy power outage. Heck, being in our mid-70s, some days we have difficulty coping with life (and our health issues) when the weather is just fine.
Saturday morning, today, Nelsen wrote a weather summary for the impending storm. It said in part:
- Today features mainly freezing rain and ice pellets south of the metro area down to Eugene. Expect power outages due to thick ice glazing. All models point to a destructive ice storm the next 12 hours in the Willamette Valley, Coast Range, and northern Oregon coastline.
Well, it probably is true that the weather models Nelsen looked at Saturday morning said that a destructive ice storm was going to hit the Willamette Valley. But Wednesday the National Weather Service had forecasted just a tenth of an inch of freezing rain, and on Saturday the amount was .25 to .50 an inch in the Willamette Valley, not the inch Nelsen was forecasting.
At the very least, Nelsen should have told his viewers that there was considerable uncertainty in how much freezing rain would fall in the Salem area, with an inch being a worst-case scenario that had a good chance of not happening.
Look, I understand that local news on television is subject to the same pressures to keep viewers interested and engaged that social media like Facebook and Twitter are. Advertisers want as many eyes as possible on their ads. To get viewers, news outlets have to sensationalize things. As the old saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads" (the newscast).
However, I see local news weather people as needing to adhere to a higher standard. Accuracy should be job #1. Entertainment value should be a distant second priority. Really low temperatures (its 18 right now in Salem) combined with a lot of freezing rain producing power outages is a scary proposition.
If that's a near-certainty, fine. Mark Nelsen should have spoken the truth. But it turned out that not only wasn't there an inch of freezing rain in the Salem area, there was very little. Nelsen's confidence in his forecast was misplaced.
So today I shifted our DirecTV DVR to start recording the Channel 2 news at 11 pm. For it will take a while for me to forget how badly Nelsen botched the freezing rain forecast for our area.
Oh, almost forget to mention, for the benefit of other weather geeks, that after it was clear that the National Weather Service did the best job in forecasting the winter storm, I searched for an iPhone app that made use of NWS data and came up with the National Weather Forecast Data app.
It isn't the most attractive or well designed weather app, but it packages NWS data in an easy to use format and has lots of information that isn't available on other weather apps. For example, it has a "Discussion" section where detailed analyses written by regional NWS offices can be read. Geeky for sure, which is why I like this app and have paid $11 for a year's subscription to the Pro version.
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