I’m of the opinion that when most people tune in to watch the weather report, they do so primarily to determine what the forecasted weather conditions will be, e.g. will it rain tomorrow, how hot will it be, etc.
And yet, rather than simply being told what conditions to expect, we are first subjected to several minutes worth of esoteric prattle about things like ‘barometric pressure’, 3-dimensional Doppler radar scans, and detailed discussions about the movements of low-pressure systems. I doubt that viewers care about such things. For example, when you ask people what the weather was like during their vacation, how often do they state that the barometric pressure was 29.93 inches of mercury and falling?
So why do television stations do this? How does providing us with useless and unwanted information improve their ratings??
Unfortunately, weather has inherent complications that often don’t allow a dead-simple forecast to have any real chance of being accurate.
If I’m told it will rain tomorrow, I’d typically like to know whether this will be rain associated with an approaching warm front (might drizzle for many hours), with cu-nims (might rain hard for a short time) or with a hurricane making landfall (a deluge). A fast-moving cold front can result in very predictable weather; a front that sort of “sags down” on you can be very hard to predict.
The basic answer it that trying to treat a complex subject as if it’s really simple often gives unsatisfactory results.
I would imagine–and this is just an opinion–that they do it to justify their existence.
I remember the days when TV news meant “news, weather, and sports.” The emphasis was on national, regional, and local news. The weather told you whether to wear your parka tomorrow, or if you’ll need an umbrella. The sports told you how well the local teams did: they won, they lost, they’ll need ___ to win on Sunday, and so on.
Now, they have to pack in various human interest stories (“And here’s farmer Elmer Gump, who grew a 500-pound pumpkin”), entertainment news (“This just in–Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes will raise their baby as a Scientologist”), and a whole host of other things that don’t count (again, IMHO) for much (Here’s some news from the Moscow Pig Olympics…")
So how does weather compete? By making itself seem more important. Throw out the barometric pressure in inches of mercury (wow–impressive), talk about jet streams and cold fronts (wow–impressive), and if possible, work in wind chills in, say, watts per square meter (wow–super impressive). This is science; it’s important! More important certainly that what Paul McCartney or Tom Cruise or Brett Favre is doing… isn’t it?
Weather is still weather. If we dress it up like science, it’s pretty impressive. But in spite of the millibars and inches of mercury and watts per square meter, I still find myself wondering if I should wear my parka to school tomorrow.
As hard as this is to believe I have found a LOT of people are very into weather. The weather channel gets watched hour after hour.
Plus like in certain cities, like Chicago, you can have a 10° differnce from the offical location on the NW side at O’hare, from the loop location, downtown
Another is cost. TV stations spend a LOT of money to have the latest geer for their weather and have to have the product to justify the cost. Where we once had a simple radar to tell where there is a tornado warning, we know have sophisticated radar that the TV stations can get information out of to get the tornado’s locations down to the suburb and street of that suburb.
Not that the TV stations pays for the radar but the people need more techinical skills to interpet and that costs and boosts up salaries.
We have lots of microclimates in the Bay Area, so the weather in Marin County is way different from the weather in San Francisco and the weather there is different from the weather in Livermore which is different from the weather where I live. Seeing the Doppler radar helps figure out what is where, and when it will hit you.
Our weather doesn’t do much with pressure, but lots with radar.
My wife loves the weather - we have two wireless weather stations, one getting the
Accuweather forecast, and one with the outside and inside temperatures.