Enough of coverage of global warming and all the rantings and ravings it inspires. The Boston Globe‘s Carolyn Y. Johnson today takes readers for a visit with the corps of weather forecasters, some of them trained meteorologists (especially the ones at the National Weather Service) including some pretty sharp tacks with local TV who try to tell New Englanders whether those clouds mean snow or what.
This isn’t a science research story, of course, more of a story of scientific applications in daily life, but it’s full of computers and modeling and radar and satellite observations and stuff like that. Close enough to science, and a timely story that’s reflects a little bit of enterprise and shoe leather.
She does not get into the question many people ask with a smirk about weather forecasting – if science can’t even tell if it’s going to be windy in two weeks, how can it tell us what the weather is going to be like in two decades? Smart move, that. The answer would just cause a loons to clutter the paper’s comment server.
– Charlie Petit
Leave a Reply