Doing Something About the Weather
There’s a post on the Capital Weather blog today that ends with mention of an “early nor’easter.” I guess it’s time to go buy some milk, because we’re already stocked up on bread and toilet paper.
I’m a transplant from Oklahoma. I went to the University of Oklahoma, which has a highly rated metorology program (if they do say so themselves). Norman (where OU is) is also home to NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, so you can’t help but meet at least one present or future meteorologist just in the course of living and studying there. I lived through a lot of Oklahoma weather before I moved to DC. If there’s anything special about weather reporting in Oklahoma, it’s that they reserve the breathless reporting for when you actually might need to be worried. Actual tornado nearby? Check. Weather that might produce an actual tornado? Sure. Heavy storm? They’ll tell you it’s a heavy storm without dressing it up.
Meteorologists themselves, on the other hand, seem to be an excitable bunch. I know from my time in the dorms at OU that whenever there was a possibility of an interesting storm, some student would go running down the halls pounding on the doors of other meteorology students, announcing once they were all poking their heads out that there was going to be a chase. At that point there would be a fury of activity as everybody grabbed whatever they needed and ran for the exits.
So weather coverage elsewhere (especially here in DC) seems to involve a bit of panic and a bit of general meterology-nerd excitement (and don’t get me wrong – I freely admit I’m a nerd, and from my perspective meteorologists are all big nerds), all mingled together inappropriately. What gets in my craw here specifically is the constant mention of the dreaded “nor’easter,” as if the term held any meaning anymore.
And to a meteorologist, it does hold meaning. It’s a specific macro pattern of weather with defining characteristics, and when it happens there are certain things a meteorologist will expect to be true. But the problem, I suspect, is that when a meteorologist gets excited about a big thing (and a nor’easter is big – in geographic terms, anyway) the coverage then assumes a different meaning of “big” (as in, catastrophic).
So when we’re getting a nor’easter (which happens a couple times a year, it seems), the coverage treats it as if it’s a 20-year storm. Nobody ever says, “welp, it’s prolly gonna be just like the last five or six of these we had over the past few years.” Or, “yeah, there’s going to be snow from Boston to Baltimore, but we get through it every year. We always do.” The weather men know what they mean by “Nor’easter” (here’s that wikipedia link again) but nobody else does.
So if the weather people on TV never used the term “nor’easter” again, or if they did but they downplayed it, I’d be OK with that. But I’m tired of being told to panic when all we’re getting is just the same damned thing we’ve had before.
