I Am The Weatherman!

We had a major storm approaching a few weeks ago and everybody kept coming to me and asking me, “How much [snow] are we going to get?” I guess I should back up a little bit. One of the benefits of getting your pilots license is that you have to learn quite a bit about the weather and weather patterns. Combine a hobbyist interest in weather forecasting and you end up being an amateur weatherman.

With the approach of past storms I have made some predictions of my own within the office. Fortunately, many of my predictions were close to accurate, sometimes better that the local TV and radio stations. After many predictions, now I am known at the office as our official amateur weatherman.

The local weather forecasts were predicting that this approaching major winter storm could dump up to 12 inches of snow for our area. That is some serious snow. The morning before the storm, the storm was predicted to hit around 6pm, I started getting questions about the forecast. So I started looking at the online weather sites.

Using various internet sites to view the published weather reports and predictions, as well as view the various satellite and radar views, I tracked the storm all day. I printed out the radar views every hour or so and plotted the course of the storm as it approached. By mid-day I saw a shift in the movement of the low pressure area over Arkansas. The Low, which had been steadily moving north-east, was now heading east. This moved the storm to the south of us and changed the forecast, at least that I what I said.

All morning I had agreed with the predictions made by everybody. We were going to get hit with a major winter storm and get 6 to maybe 12 inches of snow. By early afternoon with the low pressure area moving east, I said that we would be on the edge of the storm. I also said that people living north of us, even as close as 30 miles away, would get little or no snow. I predicted that we would get 3 to 6 inches. I also predicted that the farther south you get from here, the more snow they will see.

The morning, the morning after the storm, I woke up to list over 4 inches of snow in my yard. When I got to work and talked to my coworkers, they all said my predictions were right on target. People living north of this town got no snow. In fact the snow line was only a few miles north of town. And, people living 30 miles south of town got the 12 inches as predicted.

I guess with all this I am blowing my own horn. And that is fine with me. This blog is my blog designed for me to blow my own horn anyways. But what impressed me was that I was able to predict the storm accurately with the information available on the internet. Using sites such as the National Weather Service, The Weather Channel, Weather Underground and a few aviation sites; I was able to follow just what happened to the storm as it approached this area.

When I was learning how to fly I thought all that weather information that I had to learn was something of a waste of time. I know I am a private pilot and I know I cannot fly into clouds and bad weather, and I figured it was just a simple task of staying out of the bad weather areas. But now I fly ultralight aircraft and the weather is even more important so I learned as much as I can about weather. I learned that small changes can have a dramatic effect on your approaching weather. The entire experience re-enforced on me the need to understand the various aspects of weather and weather patterns, especially in flying.

So now I am the Weatherman.