At 2 o'clock on a recent June afternoon,
a group of golfers were glued to the Weather Channel® on a
TV on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. They had little better
to do since the Oyster Reef golf course had been closed and cleared
when the National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm
warning for nearby Savannah, Georgia, a half-hour earlier. They
could hear reverberating booms of thunder off in the distance,
and the sun was a pale disk through the fringe of the storm's
anvil top.
One golfer went to the clubhouse desk and observed to the manager
that the golf course was in Beaufort County, South Carolina, and
not Savannah. The manager retorted that the warning was for Savannah
and nearby coastal waters, and in his opinion, the golf course
abutted such coastal waters. The course would stay closed until
the warning ended at 2:30 P.M. or was called off.
Back at the TV, a consensus based on Weather Channel® radar
animations was growing that the feared storm appeared to be going
by to the south and missing the golf course. It had blown out
windows and flattened trees in downtown Savannah, but the only
effects at Oyster Reef so far were that muffled thunder could
be heard and no golf could be played. Within a few minutes, the
dozen or so golfers watching the TV had informally agreed that
the short-term forecast for Oyster Reef was "no thunderstorms."
Although a meteorologist (one of the authors) happened to be present,
the forecast was made strictly by nonmeteorologists. The forecast
verified, but perhaps the golfers did not appreciate the possible
dangers. While most lightning occurs under the cumulonimbus thunderstorm
cloud, most does not equal all. There are periodic reports in
the news about someone being struck and killed by lightning when
they thought the storm had passed. Of course, the only direct
evidence that the person believed the storm would pass was that
he was still on the course when he was struck. Golfers are often
the tallest objects on open parts of a course, and their metal
clubs can be an attractive target. The recent demise of metal
spikes probably makes little difference; the change was made to
protect golf courses, not to avoid lightning.
Like the golfers, watchers of today's weather reports on TV, with
sophisticated satellite pictures and extensive radar coverage,
can decide on their own what to expect in the next few hours.
All that is needed is to determine where you are on the map, then
see where the precipitation is moving.
But surely there is more to forecasting than watching where something
is moving now and extrapolating to some time in the future. This
chapter's topic is unit 3's central question: How are weather
forecasts made?
In this chapter, you will learn how you can participate in the
kind of forecasting done at the golf course. You will also discover
how a far wider range of forecasts is made, and you will be in
a position to judge the likelihood of success of most forecasts
you hear or see. In addition, you will learn why some forecasts
turn out to be spectacularly accurate while others seem so far
off the mark they appear to have been made for another planet.
Using Forecasting Tools in a real Weather Situation simulation (7543.0K) |