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Remember when I said on Sunday that they’d expand that Winter Storm Watch to include us? Here we are. From Missouri to Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, it’s a Winter Storm Warning. Here it comes. Here’s the big picture: MONDAY NIGHT: … Continue reading
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Most of our domesticated animals are wusses because we keep them inside, close to us. Especially the little ones. They only go outside a few times a day and they’re not accustomed to staying out in the cold weather… which … Continue reading
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As the cold front crosses the area late this afternoon, the temperatures will start to drop and the rain will change to wintry mix and then to snow showers. Flurries and snow showers will continue through Wednesday morning. Accumulations will … Continue reading
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From Cleveland, the Power of 5′s Chief Meteorologist Mark Johnson compiled a great list of the Top 5 Weather Events in the 2000s. Even though the list is focused on northeast Ohio, most of these events affected central Ohio as well.
Great article, Mark! Thanks for compiling the list!
Click here for Johnson’s list.
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| AMS’s seal for Certified Broadcast Meteorologist. Marshall is CBM #501! |
It’s official! The paperwork arrived Monday!
I have a brand new seal!
I earned the American Meteorological Society’s “Seal of Approval” a few years ago… that’s the black-and-white one you see on TV all the time.
Now, it’s been upgraded! I get the gold seal for “Certified Broadcast Meteorologist.”
Woo hoo!
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| AMS’s Seal of Approval. Marshall is Sealholder #1416. |
Here’s the news release:
NBC 4′s Marshall McPeek Earns Designation as
AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist
Marshall McPeek of WCMH-TV (NBC 4) has earned the American Meteorological Society’s Certified Broadcast Meteorologist (CBM) designation, a professional recognition of the quality of his weather broadcasts. Among radio and television meteorologists, the CBM designation is sought as a mark of distinction and recognition.
The AMS grants the CBM designation to broadcast meteorologists who meet established criteria for scientific competence and effective communication skills in their weather presentations. The CBM is a relatively new program, launched in January 2005 as an upgrade to the Society’s Seal of Approval program.
“The Society’s Certified Broadcast Meteorologist designation clearly recognizes that the holders have the educational background and have been tested in their knowledge and communication of the sciences needed to be an effective broadcast meteorologist,” said AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter. “The general public can have added confidence in the quality and reliability of weather presentations made by broadcast meteorologists approved by the Society.”
To earn the CBM, broadcasters must hold a degree in meteorology or equivalent from an accredited college or university, pass a rigorous written examination, and have their on-air work reviewed to assess technical competence, informational value, explanatory value, and communication skills.
In addition to the initial educational and test requirements, CBMs have to earn professional development points in order to maintain their certification. These points can be earned by attending scientific seminars or meetings and similar activities.
McPeek joined Storm Team 4 in January 2002. He provides forecasts for the weekend editions of NBC 4 TODAY and for nbc4i.com.
The AMS is the nation’s largest professional society for those in the atmospheric and related sciences. The Society, founded in 1919, has more than 11,000 members around the world.
For more information on the Certified Broadcast Meteorologist (CBM) Program, go to http://www.ametsoc.org/amscert/index.html and nbc4i.com.
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| Photo by Don Fannin |
On Christmas Day 2010, NBC 4 viewer Don Fannin snapped this photo of a robin in a tree near the Marblehead Lighthouse on Lake Erie.
“What the heck is a Robin still doing in Ohio?” Don asks.
So we did a little research.
Many robins do fly south for the winter, but not all of them. Females are more likely to migrate than males because they need to make sure they have a good food source all winter that will make them strong enough to migrate and lay eggs in the spring. Males often remain in northern areas to guard their territory.
Journey North, A Global Study of Wildlife Migration and Seasonal Change, funded by Annenberg Media’s Learner.org, says robins usually feed on bugs and worms but can switch to fruits and berries when the meaty critters aren’t available. As long as the berries are accessible throughout the winter, the birds will hang around. If the food runs out, they’ll find a new place.
They grow lots of extra down feathers before the cold weather arrives and they shiver to make their own heat. They’ll usually find some shelter from the harshest elements and can survive just fine in extremely cold weather.
More robins will return once the weather begins to warm up in the spring. But you can actually see some of them all year long.
Unfortunately, this particular robin is not an early sign of spring. Spring still starts in 83 days… on March 20th, at 7:21pm EDT.
photo: nbc4i.com
Jym Ganahl made a fairly profound comment in the past week or so that we’d all be smart to remember. It stems from his experience as a forecaster and observer and because he’s a man with a keen eye for patterns. As a fellow forecaster, it was a great lesson for me… and for our viewers.
Computer weather-prediction models and meteorologists struggled mightily with the path of this year’s Christmas Storm. Small shifts in the storm’s track made enormous differences in the extended forecast. And, as it turned out, the long-range projections couldn’t have been more wrong.
It was just as frustrating for the weather guys as it was for viewers and travelers. We had all said there was a huge snow storm on the way. A few days before it was supposed to pummel us, all the forecasters began backtracking. From the National Weather Service, to the broadcast mets to the presenters on national television, everyone was pulling back on the Snowmageddon predictions.
FOX8 Extended Forecast: fox8.com
Six to ten days into the future, the storm’s projected track took it right through parts of Ohio and dumped half-a-foot of snow on the region, guaranteeing a very White Christmas. As the days wore on and the models kept churning out new solutions, the storm track shifted to the south. Then the models diverged on both the timing and the track. They were different by hundreds of miles and nearly 24 hours. They produced radically different forecasts.
Part of the problem is that small differences in the early part of the number-crunching can produce larger and larger differences later on.
Even if you despise math, bear with me for a moment:
If you multiply 5 x 2, you get 10… then 20… then 40… then 80…
Continue multiplying by 2 and after about 20 repetitions you’ll get to 2,621,440.
However, change it to 2.01, which is a relatively small modification, and in the same number of multiplications, you’ll get to 2,882,007.425.
That’s a significantly different result from a very small change… and very quickly.
Run it out 50 repetitions and look at the difference:
2814749767106560.000
vs.
3593989615656160.000
The very small difference compounds and, eventually, turns into a very large difference.
That’s pretty much the concept of the “Butterfly Effect.” When a butterfly flaps its wings, it creates a very small disturbance in the atmosphere. That initial ripple then sets off a chain of events, eddies and waves that result in a massive impact down the line; in one example, the end result is a tornado in Texas.
As Ben Gelber mentioned in an earlier post, it’s all part of Lorenz’s Chaos Theory.
That leads us back to the computer models.
Garbage in, garbage out. Remember that from the 1980s? It still holds true today. If the initial conditions in the computer models aren’t the same, the results won’t be either. In the extended forecasts, the models are projecting the formation and evolution of storms and systems that don’t yet exist. If they don’t start the process with reliable or identical data, they will produce wildly different results. They didn’t start with the same butterflies, so they don’t end with the same tornadoes.
The shorter the forecast period, the less opportunity there is for the errors to compound.
In other words, the farther you go out in the forecast, the less accurate it can be… inherently… because the errors just feed on one another.
Graphic: National Hurricane Center
This is one of the reasons the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts come out as cones instead of just lines. There’s a larger and larger margin of error as the forecast moves farther into the future.
Which, finally, brings us to what I’m going to start calling “Ganahl’s Law.”
During the week, as the models and the forecasts continued to change, Jym Ganahl reminded us that we can’t really know what a system is going to do until it (a) forms in real time and (b) moves east of the Rocky Mountains. Once it’s past the Rockies, we can get a better handle on its projected track because then the system actually exists, it has real properties and characteristics and it is finally interacting with known atmospheric dynamics.
Sometimes, that’s less than 48-hours into the future. Before that, it’s some pretty serious guesswork.
And Jym was absolutely right.
Some of us, myself included, occasionally put way too much faith in the computer models.
Therefore, the newly-dubbed Ganahl’s Law states that, “The path of a synoptic scale cyclone may not be accurately forecast in the eastern two-thirds of the United States prior to the physical storm moving east of the Rocky Mountains.”
Sure, I’m willing to accept some minor modifications to the new Law. But you get the idea.
Our meteorological crystal balls may be good, but they have very real limits. It takes a storm like this Christmas’ to remind us that the computer models are not infallible and that extended forecasts, even five to seven days out, are merely a well-educated guess.
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Let’s be perfectly honest, a White Christmas, really, is a state of mind. But there are also meteorological definitions for it, too. According to the US National Climatic Data Center, a White Christmas is “a snow depth of at least … Continue reading
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We’re watching this Christmas Eve/Day winter storm pretty closely. It’s still four days out and the models are coming up with very different solutions. The ECMWF keeps the storm away from NYC until mid-morning on Monday. That means weekend holiday … Continue reading
Diagram from Space.com. For the first time since 1638, we’ll have a total lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice. Most of North America will have a great view of it, except us. Sadly, Central Ohio has clouds and snow on … Continue reading
