I have very simple needs when it comes to the weather.
Do I need an umbrella? Do I need a coat?
Unfortunately, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to quickly get the answers to these questions watching the weather on TV.
I blame it all of The Weather Channel. Thanks to The Weather Channel, we all get to hear about temperatures inversions and dry lines and pressure gradients and El Niño and La Niña and Santa Ana winds, and I still don’t know whether I should take a jacket.
I had an uncle that watched The Weather Channel for hours on end. You’d walk into his house and he’d be sitting there watching the forecast.
“What’s going on?” we’d ask.
“Looks like a major blizzard building up over Saskatchewan,” he’d say. “Could be the worst they’ve seen in 20 years.”
OK, but we’re in Georgia, and I don’t remember the last time we had a blizzard. I’d care about a blizzard in Saskatchewan if I were a moose. But I’m not.
The popularity of The Weather Channel has affected the way local TV stations report the weather, too.
Used to be that stations would squeeze in the weather forecast right after the farm report and right before the sports.
The station’s weatherman – or at some stations, the “weather girl” – would come out and write on the weather map with a piece of chalk. If your station was particularly high-tech, the weather person might use a Magic Marker.
They’d draw a sun with a smiley face over the southeast, or maybe a thundercloud with a lightning bolt coming out of it. Up north, it seemed, they always drew snowflakes. Then they’ll tell you whether it would rain tomorrow and how hot it would be.
The whole thing lasted about 30 seconds, and they moved you on to more important stuff such as did the Braves beat the Phillies last night?
Today, it’s a whole different ballgame. They’ll talk about the weather for most of the newscast, especially is someone spots a dark cloud on the horizon. They spent 10 minutes using special computer graphics to show you high-tech radar and satellite images before finally telling you it’s going to rain tomorrow, which is all you wanted to know in the first place.
And they all have fancy names for their weather reports and all their weather gadgets. They don’t just give you the weather forecast. They give you the “Action Eyewitness News Storm Tracker Plus” forecast. They don’t just show you the weather radar. They show you the “Super Power Doppler 4000 with Enhanced Imaging” radar.
In fairness, most TV weather people do a pretty good job of letting us know what’s going on, especially if there’s severe weather in the area. They should be credited for that, because they save lives by alerting us of approaching danger.
But I laugh when the TV weather person shows a radar image and says, “Here is the tornado that is headed for town.”
I don’t see anything but a blob of red and yellow and orange. It doesn’t look like a tornado to me. It looks like something my niece painted when she was 3.
I have my own way of forecasting. Each morning, I open the back door so Milly, the liver and white springer spaniel who lives at my house, can go out and tend to her morning needs. If Milly comes back in wet, I know to take my umbrella.
Don’t need a “Super Power Doppler 4000” for that
