SIAP: Could Spring Game be cancelled?

Some people in the world don't have the luxury of being born "TV pretty." I'm not saying it's the case for corundum, necessarily, but some of us were born with an unfortunate affliction known as "a face for message board posting."

I'm going to give you an in-depth answer since I have a bit of insight here. First of all, TV news forecasters are broadcast journalists first and meteorologists second. They are hired based on their personality and aesthetic qualities rather than their academic achievements. Also, they are paid significantly less and work shit hours when compared to what one would expect in the private sector or in a government role. Pressure from their broadcasting affiliate often forces them to turn weather events into news, exaggerating severe potential or possible snowfall accumulations. Another important thing to note is that they are forecasting for an entire broadcast region, so while you might laugh at a "50% chance of rain", this in reality implies that half of the broadcast region will get rain, rather than a 50/50 shot at your exact location. The next thing to consider is that the NWS is the only source of weather balloon data which samples the upper atmosphere twice per day in pre-determined locations. This upper air data is fed into the models and a forecast is created using analog data, geographical bias, climatology, and model output statistics (MOS). Your local news channel does not collect any data outside of radar/satellite interpretation and temperatures across the viewing area. Finally, models differ between each other and none of them are extremely accurate until about 24 hours out in the winter and 12 hours out in the spring/summer. Spring and summer forecasting is more difficult as convection occurs at a smaller resolution than mid latitude cyclone and clipper events that dominate winter synoptic scale meteorology in the midwest states. An ensemble model forecast has to be decided upon and only the most experienced forecasters can combine that with analog data to know the deficiencies for their area. This can be almost impossible to realize for news forecasters as they tend to move around to other broadcast affiliates every 3-5 years. The best forecat source is by far the NWS as that organization employs the most technical meteorologists on the whole and actually collects the upper air data. They have no external pressure to exaggerate storm impacts and communicate with other forecasting offices within the NWS to make forecats consistent.

Mobile +1

'cause it's easier to be accurate about broad-scope predictions than short-term minutiae. I didn't realize that was a controversial concept.

SMH. Climate and weather are not the same thing. 

Sorry, dude.