If I hear another person declare that it is going to rain on some event or "It’s supposed to rain on…:
“Easter”
“Over the weekend”
“Tomorrow”
Next Week"
I am going to scream… or punch someone. Hard. In the face.
I don’t mind someone calling me to tell me we can’t go fishing tomorrow because we’re supposed to have 3-5 foot waves and the entire coast is going to be affected by a enormous storm system. Understood.
But every weather site graphically shows any day with even a 10% chance of ‘isolated thunderstorms’ with a friggin’ dark cloud blocking the sun and rain and wind symbols interlaced with big lightning bolts. NEWS FLASH: From the Midwest USA over to the East Coast, most nice weather days are never 100% free of something like an ‘isolated thunderstorm’, and a 10% chance does not mean to stop planning the trip we finally coordinated.
The mindless drones of the world check the weather, with mouth open and a hint of drool escaping, see the pictures and run off to annoy the hell out of me with declarations that we should cancel life, because “It’s supposed to rain on Sunday.” Sure, stay in with the stockpile of milk, bread and eggs (all spoiled) that you loaded up on all winter long because 97" of snow would cripple your ability to ever eat breakfast again.
Really? 10% chance of isolated thunderstorms and that’s it? We give up?
Can you not interpret the must mundane data known to man?
It’s less intuitive than you might think- it’s basically the confidence that it will rain times the proportion of the area expected to get rained on.
So for example, if a meteorologist thinks there’s a 50% chance it’ll rain, and he thinks 80% of the area will be rained on, he’ll say that it’s a 40% chance of rain, which basically means that there’s a 40% chance that any particular point in the area will be rained on.
An ex and I were constantly planning trips to the beach, but we’d cancel because the weather report almost always predicted rain. And those turned out to be beautiful days most of the time. After a while we said screw it, weather reports are usually wrong. I can only remember one time where we had to sit in the car waiting for the downpour to clear up.
They’ve been predicting ‘X chance of rain’ in Sydney ever day for over two weeks. We’ve had barely a drop. The only time the BoM seems to get it right is if they predict a scorcher, which they won’t be anytime soon.
Oooh,my elderly mom does this all the time and it drives me bats! She’ll read the paper or watch the news and tell me that they are saying it’s going to rain or snow today, tomorrow, next Thursday…like I’m going to change anything I’m doing based on a prediction! I tell her that IF it starts raining while I’m weeding, I’ll come inside.
And then, on those days they predicted rain and it doesn’t, she’ll say (and this is the one that kills me) “Well, I guess it didn’t rain today”. And I will say (sometimes aloud) “You GUESS? You never went outside for the mail or looked out the window you’re sitting next to all day, so you can only GUESS?”