It's easy to predict the weather in Los Angeles: it's pretty much the same every day. I never realized how bad meteorologists were at predicting the weather until I moved here to St. Louis. They're commonly off by 10 degrees or more, and they can't even say if it's going to rain or not. For instance, yesterday was supposed to have a high of 78, but by late morning the temp was already 86 and the weathermen didn't even bother to update their forecasts! Today is forecast to be "8 degrees warmer than yesterday" but it's definitely not going to be 94... which means that it will probably be 86 again, and that the weathermen didn't even notice how far off their predictions were yesterday!
Message of the Day:
Bored? You'll find something new to do at MindThrow! Be a pal and Digg the MindThrow launch announcement (only takes 30 seconds).
5 Comments
Leave a comment
The comment login system is acting strange. If you get an error message saying you aren't logged in when you are, just reload the comment page and try again. I'm trying to track this bug down, but it's not easy.












Maybe yesterday's prediction was given in base 11, in which case it was quite accurate. And today's temperature where you live will be exactly 8 degrees warmer than it was yesterday somewhere else, they just forgot to mention where.
Just goes to show, lots of "predictions" can be right if you want them to be right and are willing to interpret them in a non-straightforward way... ;]
You forgot to mention the whole missing-seven-tornadoes thing, and then predicting tornadoes every time it storms, sending people screaming for the basements.
The more variables there are in the equation, the greater the chance for error.
St. Louis is famous for the statement: If you don't like the weather now, just wait an hour. I've seen the temperature go from 75 to 40 in an afternoon.
Even in California they predicted last week's heat wave to be many degrees hotter than it was, and this week they've predicted a cooling trend every day so far, but none has developed. I'd say an 8 degree average miss is about what we've seen here also for the last couple of weeks.
That's the fourth place I've heard this famous statement about... (I'm not saying it's not true, I'm just saying it's not distinctive).
75 to 40 in one afternoon (i.e. faster than the time I'd need to go home and grab a jacket) does sound pretty unpleasant, though.