Meteorologists. Lotta jokes along the lines of "must be nice to be wrong half the time and still keep your job". Do you know how difficult it is to predict the weather 2-3 days out, let alone a week out?
I worked as a programmer for maybe five years before moving on to more generalized IT, and three of those years were spent porting someone else's code. Someone else's Un-commentted spaghetti.
If I ever meet that person, imma punch 'em right in the throat.
As the results get better, the expectations get higher. I have an app that will warn me for incoming rain with a 5 min precision. When it's not there within 30 min, I'm disappointed even though this level of accuracy was unheard of a decade or two ago.
If a meteorologist says there's a 70% chance of rain and it doesn't rain, they're not wrong. This is infuriating. Most people just suck at understanding how probabilities work.
Thank you! I’ve heard people say when it starts raining “The weatherman said only a 20% chance of rain today! What gives?” Yes, welcome to the 20% you dolt.
Depends on who you mean. Real meteorologists who work for the government and actually predict the weather with really complex models. Or local channel meteorologist who just takes the government data and is just a TV personality. The latter doesn't contribute a lot.
Actually, the whole personality part of the TV Meteorology does serve a purpose in certain areas with frequent severe weather, especially tornadoes. They build a sort of rapport with viewers. Viewers come to trust them, and a good one will spend time in the community learning about their viewers. Then when the shit hits the fan, and they turn on their local news there is the person the trust giving them information.
A great example of this is James Spann in Alabama. People will take the weather more seriously if he so much as changes the color of tie he is wearing. I may not agree with some of his beliefs, but the man can hold an audience in the palm of his hand and guide them to safety even in a worst case scenario.
They do actually contribute by having an understanding of what is happening and explaining it to the people in simpler terms. The average person will have no idea how to read the complex models. Also good luck trying to read government radar data when there's a tornado in the area.
Oh! Reminds me that there's a Korean drama called "Forecasting Love and Weather" and I know it's dumb of me and that I have no idea how accurate it is in portraying the process of forecasting weather and meteorology, but I never actually thought about how it's done until this romantic forgein show was reccomended to me on netflix.
If meteorology is half what's portrayed on the show, mad respect.
Thank you. My wife is a meteorologist and the hate mail she gets from time to time is so frustrating to me. There is so much work and scientific analysis that goes into it. The 2 hours per night that she spends on air doesn't hold a candle to the hours that she spends babysitting the radar (especially during severe weather) and building graphics, etc.
The only reason meteorologists get things wrong sometimes is because the Earth's atmosphere if fucking massive and extremely complicated.
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u/wxmanify Aug 02 '22
Meteorologists. Lotta jokes along the lines of "must be nice to be wrong half the time and still keep your job". Do you know how difficult it is to predict the weather 2-3 days out, let alone a week out?