Weather `tis nobler...

I was looking at the weather report today (Sunday... I actually wrote this ahead of time!) and found something curious... The reported high is predicted to be 79F (eat your hearts out, Nawthunners...) yet, the hourly reports don't go higher than 77 at 3 PM. This means that there might be a brief period either before or after 3 PM that could possibly, maybe, we hope, where the temperature hits 79. But don't count on it.

On Monday (a much more important day since I will be playing golf in the morning) the report says the high will be 75 but no hour reports higher than 72.

Is it any wonder we do not believe weather reports? Yet we keep reading them, hoping they will be right... especially when the say "fair weather". Is it because we are eternal optimists? Certainly not so in my case. I am, after all, a diehard cynic.

I am reminded of a radio station in Los Angeles which used to report things like:

There were 6 marijuana arrests today, the high for today will be 72.

The weather report for Monday also predicts rain, thunderstorms possibly, during a couple of hours when I will be trying to play golf. Lightning and golf do not mix well. The less brain-damaged among us try to avoid playing in that kind of weather. So I will be out there. (written, of course, before my accident)

It is amazing, though, what faith we put in weather predictions. We watch them religiously, we plan events around them, we fret when rain is predicted when we want to be doing something outside. And we get angry at the weatherfolk when they are wrong. Not angry enough to lynch any of them, of course. We wouldn't do anything violent to them. After all, we are rational enough to know they have no control over the weather, aren't we?

It is, I suppose, a good thing we no longer sacrifice virgins to get rain for our crops and such. There being a shortage of them of late and all.

When I was young and limber and tanned, I used to surf. That also meant weather was very important to me. I studied weather maps in those days. There were no satellite images because there were no weather satellites yet. The weather maps had high and low pressure areas, with gradients of pressure laid out, cold and warm fronts marked clearly but they knew very little about the jetstreams' effects on weather patterns then. I would pore over these to get an idea when a storm would pass through and optimal surf conditions would appear. I found I was as good, sometimes better, than the forecasters on TV and in the paper.

I would have liked to get into that line of work, I think, if I hadn't hated chemistry so much. I even hoped to get into oceanography while in the Navy but Uncle Sam had other plans for me. Oceanography in the Navy included meteorology, if you didn't know.

I have never figured out why the science of weather prediction was called meteorology. I understand the root words but still... The word just invokes images of big rocks falling out of the sky. I have enough problems with lightning. It's another case where the Greeks had a word for it. Aristotle, of course, being the first.

From Aristotle to Al Gore...