Since it’s all over the news today, I hardly thought it was worthwhile pointing out that it’s really, really cold here. It got up to about 6°F today; right now it’s -5°F in Boston, heading for around -9°F overnight. (Up in New Hampshire, the intrepid weathermen atop Mount Washington are anticipating temperatures of -50°F which will break the record set back in 1934.) All of this is accompanied by blustery winds giving us a wind chill of -30°F.
As always, I turn to the One True Source for all this stuff: the home page for the Boston area office of the National Weather Service. One bit that I particularly enjoy is the discussions page, where the meteorologists discuss the forecast, the relative merits of the various computer models, and whatever else strikes them as important, all in uncompromising meterorological jargon. If you read this (and other offices have similar pages), you’ll understand much of of how that deceptively simple forecast comes to be made, and why and how things go wrong. Just remember: the “weatherman” on your local TV station is really just an entertainer: these guys are the professionals – geeks all.