Otterblog

I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather and about the precision with which we write about the weather. In one sense, hot is hot. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is 98 or 101. But one number is a story, and the other is a standalone picture. The way we decide that is by finding out the exact temperature. Thermometers are like clocks. There are good ones and bad ones, and even the good ones don’t always agree with each other.

Most weather stories have two parts. The first is what happened. Did it snow. How hot was it. How much rain fell? etc. The second is trickier. It is the forecast. What’s it going to be like tomorrow, this weekend?

How weather gets collected and collated and communicated is sort of a tricky business—and it is a business. The Journal essentially has three providers of weather information. Our weather page is produced by Accuweather, which bills itself as the largest private weather service in the world. They’re out of State College, Pa. But there’s also a local insert from Fox8, the television station in High Point that we have a news-sharing agreement with. The third entity is the National Weather Service. They are the collector of much of the raw data that feeds all these other sources. Typically, everybody is in pretty strong agreement about what happened, mainly because they’re all pulling from the same pot of info, even if they don’t always attribute the data to the NWS. The forecast gets a little trickier. It’s sort of like doctoring a recipe. The National Weather Service puts out a perfectly good forecast. What the private weather services do—and often do pretty well—is interpret the forecasts based on local knowledge. It’s very rare that they say black when the NWS says white. What happens more often is that they say it’s going to be a darker shade of gray than the NWS forecasts.

We ran into a problem the other day when trying to produce a graphic on what the weather would be like for Tuesday. The problem was that we got the information for the forecast from the NWS. It conflicted slightly with what Accuweather and Fox8 were predicting. Our graphics editor asked whether we in essence wanted to have what amounted to two different forecasts in the paper, even if they only disagreed by a degree or two. So, we pulled it at the last minute.

I’ll be honest. I understand the need to know what the weather might do, but there’s something magical about waking up to a snowstorm that you didn’t know 5 days out as going to arrive.

Water, water everywhere: I took part today in a blind taste test of bottled and tap water to see if we could taste the difference between all the stuff being hawked and guzzled out there. Surprising results. Look for the story in our living section in the next week or so…