Thursday, June 15, 2006

Network Meteorologists

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In another life I was a military weather forecaster and can spot a talking head vs a proffessional weatherman easily.
If a TV wetherman uses the term "thundershowers", he's most likely an idiot. I've never seen thunder "showering". Rain "showers", thunder does not. The proper terminolgy is "thunderstorms with rain showers". Why did I post this? Seems like any and everyone that can see the sky thinks they can forecast the weather. Cost me my job once. That's why I'm now a computer graphics artist and programmer. Oh, and Rodger, I can do a mean Bill Clinton impersonation if you are still looking.

Anonymous said...

In graduate school at a large Midwestern university, my professor also taught meteorology. The guy who had been doing weather for decades at one of the local stations suddenly needed to get American Meteorological Society certification. (A rival station had hired a new guy with AMS certification, and they were promoting the heck out of it.) He didn't want people to know that, after all those years, he was finally taking courses in the subject, so my prof taught him in the field station where I was doing research.

One day, I heard my prof explaining, "Barometric pressure is just the weight of the air above you. If the entire atmosphere got warmer, it would expand, and become less dense, but it's weight wouldn't change, so the barometric pressure wouldn't necessarily change."

That night, I'm watching the local news. The weather guy does the forecast, then says, "And now the weather fact of the day. If the whole atmosphere got warmer, the barometric pressure would drop because the air would be less dense!"

He never got AMS certifications.

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