Are Meteorologists Always Wrong??

We’ve all heard the joke or made the joke…“I wish I could be wrong most the time and keep my job.” This of course is in reference to meteorologists, along with a plethora of other jokes. While it is no big deal (and actually funny at times) that people make jokes about this profession, it is important to realize the importance of meteorologists and understand the facts. So, are meteorologists always wrong?

Lets first discuss two issues plaguing America and how they affect our understanding of a forecast:

Ignorance – the lack of knowledge or information. Ignorance has been given a negative connotation, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. I am ignorant to the proper use of hair care products. However, I would venture to say that most girls are not. To learn about hair care products, I simply must consult a woman with this knowledge. In the same way, many people just don’t understand the complexities of forecasting or  the terminology used. What is the difference between scattered showers and isolated showers? How about the infamous percentages! What in the world does a 20% chance of rain mean? Most people would automatically assume that means it probably won’t rain, however, the probability of precipitation is simply a statistical probability of 0.01″ inch of more of precipitation at a given area in the forecast area in the time period specified. To learn more about precipitation forecasting, check out this link.

Facts have a way of getting misconstrued in today’s age, through social media, the news, etc. Who is to blame for bad facts? Well, no one and everyone. Everybody may have chipped in equally in the twisting and turning of the truth, but no one may have deliberately changed the facts. This happens often with weather forecasts. People may see a forecast for severe storms and automatically tweet it out as a “Tornado Outbreak on the Way!!!“ Whoever sees this will go and tell all their friends, but when there really isn’t a tornado outbreak everyone is mad. Another scenario similar to this occurs frequently in the Ohio Valley during the winter. We are often in the battle ground zone (rapid changeover from rain to snow area) in winter systems. A forecast may call for 2 – 4 inches for Bowling Green, however some people only see the 4 inches and relay the forecast as “4 inches of snow on they way!” Well, not completely true, because if the lower end of the forecast pans out, many people are going to think the forecast was off by 2 inches.The fact of the matter is (no pun intended), we must all work together to educate and properly relay information to our communities.

Here are two really good articles addressing this issue. The first is from Dr. Marshall Shepherd who uses football examples to debunk the myth that meteorologist are always wrong. Here is one example from his blog:

“If a field goal kicker makes every single kick all year long, he’s a good kicker, statistically and from the “eyeball” test perspective. Yet, if that kicker misses an important field goal in the Superbowl or national championship game, some will question his skills or criticize. Humans tend to focus on bad outcomes that affect them and forget the likely more numerous good outcomes. Meteorologists and the models are more accurate than people think, but people remember the rained out picnic that affected them personally.”

The second  blog from Brad Panovich goes even deeper and provides statistics to debunk the myth. Here are some statistics from other professions:

Medical Profession

“Did you know that according to the Journal of Clinical Oncology that 44% of some types of cancer are misdiagnosed? The Mayo Clinic in 2012 found that there was about a 26% misdiagnosis rate amount all illnesses. Doctors have very tough jobs and medicine has advanced way more than meteorology. Not to mention this one gigantic caveat is that doctors are not trying to predict the future.

Now I’m not picking on doctors but we would never get angry at a doctor for being overly cautious if he or she thought we might have cancer. Common sense says if you have a lump, dis-colored mole or other symptoms that might be cancer you get it check out ASAP. We have done a great job educating people on early diagnosis and being safe not sorry when it comes to cancer.

Yet people get mad that we issued so many tornado warnings even though on average about 75% don’t produce a tornado.”

NBA:

“Amir Johnson let the league in field goal percentage this last season at 65%. Which means he missed 35% of the time. Kevin Durant was the MVP and he only shot 50.3% from the field. Meaning he missed half his shots. He did make 87% of his free throws though.

Again, not predicting the future.”

NFL: 

“Philip Rivers led the league in competition percentage last season at 69.5%. That was awesome but he still missed 30.5% of his passes. Again a very hard thing to do is to play NFL quarterback but still not predicting the future.”

MLB:

“Always a stats field day here. Miguel Cabrera led the league in hitting last season at .348 which basically means he got a hit 35% of the time. That means he didn’t get a hit the other 65% of the time. Ty Cobb is considered the best hitter of all time at .366 but that’s only a 37% success rate. Again hitting a baseball maybe the hardest thing to do in sports, yet still not predicting the future. Though hitters always try to guess what type of pitch is coming next.”

Check out these graphs of the accuracy of tornado forecasting.

 

I will leave you with one more fact, and maybe one of the most mind blowing facts of all. Meteorologist use weather models as an aid to their forecasts. Weather models do okay in the short term, but are miserable at forecasting more than 4 or 5 days ahead. Therefore, meteorologist can’t rely wholeheartedly on these models. Why do the models get it wrong? Take for instance the operational IBM Super Computer in Gaithersburg, MD, which runs our weather models. This super computer receives over 1.7 billion observations daily and uses these observations to compute 13.99 TRILLION calculations per second! Need I say more?