Sunday, December 21, 2008

Bass Ackwards

It just astounds me how often the weather prognosticators get our weather wrong. I realize that weather prediction is not an exact science, but if you used the Southwest Washington Coast as a guide, you would think there was no science involved altogether. Sometimes I think we'd be just as well off if we received no weather predictions at all!

For the last three days we've been told that the storm of storms was headed our way. It would start off slowly Saturday morning with light snow. The light dusting would continue until late afternoon or early evening, then the heavens would open up and we could expect around one foot of snow. Not only that, but once this frosty deluge started, we would be buffeted by sustained winds of 25 - 35 mph with gusts of 50 mph or more.

As usual, the forecast didn't resemble the actual event at all. For starters, the snow began at around 9:00 a.m. on Saturday and dropped between 4 - 6 inches on us throughout the day. When late afternoon arrived -- the time the heavy snow was supposed to commence -- it stopped snowing. For the last several hours we've had nothing more than light rain and the temperature has shot up past freezing (it was in the 20s for most of the day -- 10 degrees or so colder than predicted).

Not only did the massive evening snow not materialize, our winds were meager compared to the predictions. Our top wind gust was only 17 mph, far less than the predicted sustained winds.

The forecast high for today is 45 degrees. I hope this proves to be correct as my wife was unable to ascend our 3 block long hill in the car. It's somewhere down the hill off the road. Maybe we will be able to float down the hill in the snow melt to retrieve it. :-)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are unmoderated, so you can write whatever you want.