Politician, obviously. 
Funny, but I’ve pretty much succeeded in avoiding seeing/hearing those. I think the extent to which one is annoyed by such messages depends on how much attention you place on weather forecasts.
I only really care if I have something important planned. Say an outdoor cookout, or some travel that might be unpleasant/dangerous. Even then, I figure the predictions are of little use until 2 days out. In fact, I prefer if the longterm forecasts are bad, because I figure they are likely to change for the better. Conversely, if they predict glorious weather 7-10 days out, I figure it will change for the worst.
But this week? I’d like to bike today, tomorrow and Friday, and golf next Sunday. For each of those, I can make the call that morning. And if one day gets rained/snowed out, there is always another day to bike or golf.
I’m wondering what everyone has planned that the weather makes all that much difference. The OP wanted a “snow day” like a kid? If you want a 4-day weekend - take a vacation day. Other than that, like I said, get gas for the blower, check where your shovel/windshield scraper are, and plan some extra time for a long commute. Maybe if you were planning on crucial errands Mon-Tues, plan on going without - or run them over the weekend. November snow - with temps predicted in the 50s by later this week - isn’t going to stick around.
After getting terribly frustrated with both TWC’s site and Accuweather, I have found that the Weather Underground gives me everything I need to know quantitatively in one compact neat package (Cleveland extended forecast as a sample). The only bias I have noted is that going out more than 4 days or so the temps tend to be regressed to the long-term means, and will generally diverge from said means the closer it gets to the target date.
FTR, I got maybe an inch on my car this morning, no ground accumulation.
For whatever it’s worth, I feel like TV/radio weather forecasters are walking a very fine line. Imagine a storm system is headed your way, and it could be a whopper – tornadoes, big snowfall, whatever. Underplay the significance and you could be putting lives in danger. Overplay it and you have egg on your face.
Honestly I think they tend to overplay it because the consequences are less dire if they do.
Politicians are right about as often as a blind squirrel finds a nut. OTOH, Blind squirrels are at least cute & draw sympathy for their disability.
I blame lawyers.
If you’re giving a weather forecast about dire conditions you predict the worst possible plus 10% to avoid litigation. From someone who “you said light snow, but it was actually moderate and I crashed my car”
Mostly I rely on the weather app on my iPhone.
Trump SCOTUS employee/minion.
Are there any documented instances of weatherpersons/media being successfully sued for insufficiently dire forecasts?
There is plenty to blame lawyers about. But no need to go overboardd.
I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but I have never heard of a weather prediction-related lawsuit. Nor do I think it could have much merit (absent deliberate actions). In general, being more careful “to avoid litigation” has make things much safer.
Weather is considered “An act of God” (whether you believe in Him or not) and, unless things have legally changed, you can’t be sued because of an act of god.
Any legal eagles here who can comment on this?
“Forecasts are inaccurate”
How can this be possible? Don’t we know exactly everything that is going to happen in the atmosphere during the next 1 to 7 days?
We don’t?
You mean, we’re talking about predictions of unknown events, not established facts?
What the fuck are you folks carrying on about, anyway?
I think the comment was more about the prediction of the weather, rather than the weather itself. I have seen suits where the FAA was sued for failing to notify airlines of likely extreme turbulence, for example.
Very interesting! Do you know if they were successful in court?
In this case, they were not.
LeGRANDE v. UNITED STATES (2012) | FindLaw
While working as a flight attendant on Southwest Airlines Flight 2745, Peggy S. LeGrande was injured when the aircraft encountered severe turbulence. She brought this action against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act (“FTCA”), 28 U.S.C. § 2674, alleging that air traffic controllers employed by the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) negligently had failed to warn the flight’s captain that turbulence had been forecast along the flight path.1 The district court concluded that FAA employees did not breach any duty owed to Ms. LeGrande and granted summary judgment for the United States. Ms. LeGrande now seeks reversal of the district court’s judgment.2 She also contends, for the first time in this litigation, that her injuries resulted from the negligence of a National Weather Service (“NWS”) meteorologist. Because the FAA breached no duty owed to Ms. LeGrande, and because Ms. LeGrande failed to give the NWS the notice that the FTCA requires, we affirm the judgment of the district court.
Thanks.
I’m a farmer. The exact weather matters a lot to me.
I read the NWS forecasts somewhat obsessively, usually several times a day and checking also the hazardous weather page and the next several precipitation prediction pages.
They’re almost always within a few degrees on the temperature, especially as the forecast gets within a couple of days. The only times those few degrees matter is when worrying about a late frost in the spring or the first one in fall. And we have a lot of microclimate; that temperature forecast is going to be dead on for somebody in the area, even if not for me.
The precipitation forecasts are less accurate. But that isn’t because they’re up to something nefarious. It’s because the exact track of either a widespread front or even worse a specific thunderstorm can make a huge difference in the amount of rain or snow in a particular location; and those exact tracks are genuinely unpredictable. And not only can a slight shift in a storm track mean that the bulk of their forecast area gets an inch of snow or a foot, but one farm can get two inches of rain while the neighbor half a mile down the road gets a sprinkle and the neighbor the other way gets destroyed by hail. And there’s no way to tell in advance which will be which; or whether they’ll all get a quarter inch and the rest goes straight into the lake. At which point you can pretty well say that somebody across the lake is about to get drenched; but that’s about five minutes’ warning.
Good question, but unless you live someplace where the weather is extremely predictable, things can change that alter whether it’s cloudy and cool, or sunny and warm, and forecasters are only so good at guessing what’s going to happen in the future.
You can skip the filter of (supposedly) hype-prone newscasters, and get your info from sites that just present the data (models with probabilities). The best is probably weatherunderground (no relation to the 1970s radical political group).
As others have alluded to in this thread, a fundamental issue is that (untrained) human brains are bad at interpreting probabilities.
Including being bad at interpreting whether forecasters are doing a good job or not.