Eagles Fan in 'Skins Land

In my travels, I have heard many, many people, friends and strangers alike, say bad things about weather forecasters. "They were wrong." "They lied." "They can't get anything right." Being a closet wannabe meteorologist, I am always trying to defend the industry, giving reason after reason why:

1) Weather has always been tough to forecast, and
2) You really can't tell from the looking out the window in the morning how the rest of the day will turn out.

I hear most of these complaints in winter, as weather takes center stage in work and recreational plans. Bad winter weather tends to be far more disruptive than anything the other seasons can churn out, discounting out of the ordinary events like hurricanes and tornado outbreaks. And everyone likes to talk about snowfall predictions and how they do or don't pan out after the fact.

But why exactly is winter weather so hard to forecast? Simply put, it's location, location, location. We live in a unique part of the world, where cold air coming out of the interior often clashes with milder, moist air from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, creating large coastal storms with different kinds of precipitation. Whenever one of these "nor'easters" form, you'll hear Sue or Tony or Gary or Gwen or Tucker mention the "rain/snow line," that ubiquitous imaginary boundary between snow and that dreaded wintry mix to rain, the line in the clouds between a day off from school or work and a miserable cold rain or slushy mix that no one wants to be in. This is because a coastal storm draws that warmer Atlantic air into itself, mixing in with the colder continental air and dropping precipitation in varying forms. Generally speaking, if you are to the left of the storm center, you'll get all snow. Closer to the center, you may get a wintry mix, while the right of the center gets mostly or all rain. Of course, this setup can vary greatly based on the amount of cold air available. The big I-95 cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington often fall along the rain/snow border, and meteorologists almost always have a tough time trying to predict exactly where that line will actually end up. A number of other factors come into play, including, but not limited to, battling polar and subtropical jet stream branches, the curious phenomenon of energy transfer from a storm in the interior to the developing low pressure area off the coast, which may suppress snow totals in the area between the storms, and the presence of a dry air slot in the storm's lower left quadrant caused by the storm circulation's interaction with land.

No one completely understands the overall mechanics of these storms, so we are left with using probabilities in forecasts. Keep in mind that you'll probably never see a 100% probability of snow until the storm is in progress. Last week's mostly rain event never got past an 80% chance of snow until it became apparent that the storm wouldn't materialize. And an 80% chance of snow means a statistically significant figure of 20% that it won't.

So the moral of my story is: cut the weather guys a break when things go wrong in winter. They're not out to get you or get higher ratings for their networks. They're doing their best -- and overall they predict weather a lot better than we can!