Here's To Weather Geeks
One of the interesting things about weather is that a lot of people are interested in it and interested deeply. It often has nothing to do with the potential weather in their area, but a deep and abiding fascination with the weather. Such "weather geeks" - and I number among them - believe that the keys to the kingdom were handed out when the Weather Channel went on the air over 20 years ago and that heaven itself came to earth when the Internet allowed almost real-time access to weather radars, maps, and all the other cool, geeky things that come with weather.

Weather geeks are also good at flying by the seat of their pants. They look at weather systems and make "guesses" based on "intuition" about what they are seeing even when it doesn't make "scientific" sense. Brendan Loy, the Irish Trojan sitting in South Bend, Indiana, is a weather geek like that. On his blog he correctly projected what he though would be a major problem storm in Katrina while the weather service was still officially uncertain. So did my friend, Ben, a couple days before the storm hit.

I have been known to go to bed completely convinced that the "blizzard" being predicted for the next day would fizzle. More often than not I have been right.

Many years ago when I lived in Pennsylvania, Joe Bastardi (today an Accu-Weather forecaster) on Penn State's daily weather program, Weather World, started on Monday to predict a BIG SNOWSTORM that would hit the following weekend. No one else agreed with him. None of the computer models agreed with him. No one was predicting it. All week long he kept pointing out the differences between his thoughts and those of the computers. As the storm roared up the east coast on Thursday and Friday Joe Bastardi had every right to say, "I told you so."

Sometimes the computer models are just too divergent to come up with good "science-based" forecasts. (Just look at the past week's changes in forecast with Hurricane Ophelia!) Other times it is just purely good guessing.

The reason for all this weather geekiness is to give a tip of the hat to the fact that there are times when good old intuition is far better than scientific reasoning. I will readily admit that there may be more times when we geeks are wrong on a daily basis, but it is the Big Storms where we can often be seen grinning with a certain after-the-fact gloating.