Re: Weather Forecast Percentages

Crop circles make me feel great, too.  I'm glad to see that they are
not only continuing but improving.

This recent one was fairly spectacular:

http://io9.com/5306026/did-this-jellyfish-crop-circle-accurately-predict-a-solar
-storm

Evidently no one has actually seen the animals falling from the sky.
What has happened is that fish and tadpoles have been observed in
unexpected places.

I'm suspecting hoaxers a la the crop circles.  Speaking of crop
circles, I haven't heard anything about them for quite a while.  Did
all of the pranksters get tired of the joke?

One very recent example of that:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/22/2604222.htm

Presumably as opposed to solid precipitation, such as hail, sleet,
snow, or animals.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raining_animals

I just remembered a classic bit of weather jargon I heard on the radio:

"We're in a liquid precipitation situation."

Except when you have four inches in an hour?

This reminds me that I recently talked with a woman who had just moved
from Arizona to Santa Fe.  She said she used to get depressed in
spring because summer was coming.

Now she'd be cheering up, I suppose, with the "monsoon" coming, except
that we've had a weird year.  Monsoon in June is crooned to the same
tune.

--
Jerry Friedman

Robert Bannister filted:

You mean you don't have a permanent "heat island" keeping the wet at bay?...r

I like it when the forecaster tells us he can see several thunderstorms
on his radar screen when we have clear skies. When the rain never
reaches our shores, however, they never explain why.

It's one of those mysteries of life.

Some 30 years ago when the Weather Bureau (I think it was still
called the Weather Bureau at that time) first started giving those
percentages, I asked a cow orker who had a degree in meteorology
what that meant.  He hadn't actually worked as a meteorologist for
at least a decade, so he didn't know, but supposed that if a
forecaster had ten indicators that suggest rain, and four of the
indicators say "yes" and six of them say "no", then the probability
of rain would be 40%.

Now of course they have satellites and ground Doppler weather radars
and know all about El Nino and everything and they still can't
forecast 8 hours in advance.  Sometimes you can look out the window
and see that the forecast is already wrong.

The TV weather forecaster says, "There's a 70 per cent chance of rain
this evening."

It sounds authoritative and scientific, but what does it actually mean?