Good Morning Jackson, it’s 7:26am under bright and sunny skies, the temp is 77 deg (F) with 80% Humidity, winds out of the SE at 6 MPH.
(News Goes here)
Our high today will be…
This is where my question comes in. We are all fine up until this point. That’s the weather here this morning. While other parts of the country are cooling down, we are still in a heat wave/major drought down here. Our Local stations are saying it’s going to be over 100 degrees for the rest of the week. It was 103 yesterday, and they’ve been pretty much right on.
However, MSNBC is claiming, laughably, that it will be down to the balmy mid 90’s by Saturday, and the weather channel is even funnier, claiming it’ll actually RAIN (whatever that stuff is) amid dropping temps. Now, the local stations have been right more than the national guys. Why? Don’t they all get their overall weather from the National Weather Service?
[hijack] The title of your topic, punful though it may be, is one of my pet grammatical peeves. The phrase “whether or not” include a redundancy. “Whether” implies “or not.” [/hijack]
We now take you back to your regularly scheduled Weather Channel.
As for the OP, the answer is yes and no. Most media outlets get their raw data from the NWS. Some employ their own meteorologists to interpret the data, some (like newspapers) buy the forecast from other sources (the NWS, The Weather Channel, a local meteorologist, etc.). Weather data, like any statistics, are open to interpretation. 10 meteorologists can look at the same data and arrive at 10 different conclusions, especially when forecasting more than 24 hours ahead.
Last January the Atlanta area was hit by a major ice storm. All the weather forecasts indicated that a winter storm was coming a week in advance but none agreed on the form or severity, even after the storm was in progress. After it was all over the local newspaper ran an article comparing forecasts to actual. The forecasts mentioned - NWS, The Weather Channel, CNN, 3 local TV networks, 2 local radio staions - ranged from “10 inches of snow” (an incredible amount for Atlanta) to “all rain, no winter weather” to “the storm will miss us completely”. Not one got it right, or even particularly close.
Weather forecasting, even by the glorified name of meteorology, is as much art as science.
I understand about the staff metorlogists thing. Seems like if you’ve lived here long enough, you’ll know that the national guys won’t have a clue. We have one guy that’s been doing weather here since before TV (literally, he started doing weather in Jackson when there was only radio).
He’s hysterical. Usually has “the weatherman says” and what he thinks will actually happen. He’s got a better record.
The fact of the matter is, that even with all our Doppler radar and sattelite pictures, an old guy with arthritis and a copy of the Farmer’s Almanac who’s lived in the area for several decades can give a lot better forcast just by looking up. In many cities, what you actually have is the old guy with arthritis, the Almanac, and the Doppler radar, who can sometimes do even better. Figure out who does a good job of it, and then ignore everyone else.
Not wanting to start anything, I must ask… “are you sure?”. Webster gives a proper example of the use of whether as “whether it rains or snows.”. So, shouldn’t we also be able to say “whether it rains or not.”? Which is pretty much the same as saying “whether or not it rains.”, isn’t it?
I am by NO means a gramatical expert, but I hold my own fairly well most of the time. whether or not you agree with me has yet to be seen…
