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Re: [at-l] Is this El Ninio?

Nobody said El Nino isn't real, just that it has little or nothing to do with
whether it's snowing in North Carolina...

I also stand by my other statements that no one can tell us why we have an El
Nino, and whether or not we will have a big one or a little one next year. The
direct effects of El Nino are not a mystery - fish kills in northern waters,
movement of tropical fish into Monterey Bay etc -  but it is being blamed - by
the popular press or whomever - for nearly everything that is happening
outside today. We are in the middle of a major ice storm in Maine, and last
night the weatherman on local TV - a meteorologist - speculated that this
could be a side effect of El Nino. That's just plain nuts. We get these every
few years folks. This is northern New England - the weather in the winter is
just plain bad!

I can sympathathize with Jim's position as a meteorologist, and can understand
his sensitivity and the defense of his vocation, but I have to disagree with
his accuracy predictions. Maybe your guys are 90% correct in the district of
Hawaii, but not here. We tracked the short term weather predictions here as a
high school science project, and the students found that the nightly weather,
delivered to us by a TV meterologist, was less thatn 60% accurate over a three
month period. I still have the data if you are interested. We shared it with
the local TV station and they just shrugged and said that they do the best
they can with what's available.  If you take the "up to the minute forcasts,"
then you can be more accurate, but I can look outside and tell you it's
raining just as well as listen to it on the radio.

I appreciate the early warning efforts that the National Weather Service tries
to provide surrounding major storms, and can also appreciate the difficulties
in getting this stuff right. Last year alone however, schools closed twice
here with the prediction of "Severe Snow Warnings" and in both cases the
storms veered off at the last minute and only dusted us with snow. Was it
prudent to close the schools anyway? This starts to sound like "The sky is
falling" pretty quickly. Another time we had no warning when an 18 inch storm
dumped on us in one night - fluries had been predicted - the storm stopped
moving and mysteriously settled over the southern coast of Maine until it
dumped all it's moisture.

I don't doubt that most meteorologists take their jobs very seriously, and
that you do the best that you can. You need an advocate to dispell the false
"facts" surrounding global weather patterns and what actions and reactions the
weather can take when we humans are involved. 

For long term weather predictions, I think that the Farmers Almanac is
probably as accurate as the Ntional Weather Service. I'm a skeptic until
proven otherwise, and quite frankly I've seen little proof that weather
forcasting today is much better than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

In my book it's still an art - practiced by scientists, but still an art.

-Tim
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