Forecaster Casting

Unless you’re ‘Chuck’ Dickens reincarnated, great expectations are hard to meet. When my high school-aged son complains about class workload, college applications or just this week’s cafeteria food I usually tell him to relax. If all things fail, there will always be one job left for him — a weather forecaster.

Why? — can anybody do this? can you walk in from the street, literally, and read it off the teleprompter? Well, a solid 1.5 min search on the web confirms, to become a broadcast meteorologist, you apparently could make do with a bachelor’s degree, preferably in atmospheric sciences or meteorology although an AP-level class in astrology coupled with viewing a YouTube video on mindfulness might get you there just as well, faster and cheaper. This is confirmed by the published fact that less than 5% of weather people have a higher ed master’s degree. So, yes, if you enrolled in an online undergrad degree, have 20/20 vision and a pulse (at the time of the interview), go ahead and apply — and, fingers crossed, once hired, get in line to take a sporting guess if it’s going to rain tomorrow or not. I hear you — I’m too hard on them, right ? — so …

… in their mathematical defense, the weather is the original ‘complex system’. That is, small fluctuations in some godforsaken hole in the wall can amount to pretty big changes on the other side of the globe (– which is why chronic flatulence is nothing to sneeze at, Cretins !). That, however, makes it notoriously difficult to predict days let alone weeks in advance; all bets are off beyond that time horizon. In other words, predicting from one minute to the next is easy and highly accurate but not of much value, while predicting months out would be super helpful but is impossible to pull off. Argghh.

So, why are we weather junkies then glued to the forecast on TV or the web? If our doctors would be half as often wrong as the weather people, we’d sue them (assuming we’d be still alive, at least that’s what the ambulance chasing ‘non-attorney spokespersons’ on TV make us believe we should be doing). The answer is somewhere between the ill-fated need for small-time entertainment in between commercial breaks and a peevish, self-defeating desire to witness that reality proves them wrong, yet once again - coupled with a sense of unbridled curiosity as to how they excuse it this time.

The challenge is that most cable programs are purely commercial and ad-supported which means they get marketing dollars scaled to the number of viewers’ eyeballs (still ‘in-socket’ or not) they attract and this in turn incentivizes spicing up the data, the very same data that is. Yep — it is my understanding that most of the forecasting “work” is actually done by the same NOAA & friends computer models that everybody subscribes to. So, the differentiators are not the data, it’s mostly the presentation, i.e. the “show” … and yes, that one absolutely ‘must go on’.

This is precisely why you see Channel XYZ’s brave ‘storm’ team illustrate the weather they would have wished they predicted in front of a bone crushing wave or in the midst of a freezing snowstorm that renders your balls the size of raisins. Believe me, they’d rather endure the mind-numbing banter with the bleached teeth and colored eyebrow equipped, middle-aged anchors and the helicopter-bound, folksy traffic reporter from inside the climate-controlled studio, but they must make it look colder, hotter, wetter than the guy or gal on the next channel. Yes, people, channel hopping is a damn scourge not a harmless run-out for your s(p)oiled remote controls! This means accessible viewership, at any point in time, is a zero-sum game — when YOU get more, I’ll keep less. As such, it comes down to packaging and, it pains me to even suggest it in rightfully sensitive times like these, this is where tight skirts, plunging necklines and pre-melanoma sun tan can make a difference, delicately sprinkled in between some old dude in an ill fitted suit that is supposed to ooze weather team ‘competence’ as in “trust me, Dear Viewers, it will snow 6 inches by 8 pm, or more, much later, whatever comes first.”

Another common tool to get through the noise and make sure the audience doesn’t go to the loo while you predict a dehydrating scorcher is cutesy anthropomorphism while getting creative with the scary labels: that is, we give hurricanes names so that under-vaxxed people in Florida can spray paint “Fred Go Home” on their reused plywood shutters as opposed to needing to remember if hurricane is spelled with one “r” or two; and, it’s not enough anymore to call a winter storm a blizzard, it’s now a freak of nature ‘bomb cyclone’ which seems to require calling in a disposal specialist in combat gear, with a Geiger counter and nervously humming a denominational prayer more so than donning standard-issued rubber boots and a trench coat. People!

In a sense, these guys create their own market by hyping up demand days prior to what surely will be a climactic, cataclysmic, or outright biblical event, as ratings drive more ratings — Ka-ching. Now, while I like a practical joke just as much as the next guy, it irks me if the forecast talks about 1 ft of snow and we’re getting 2. That’s just another single digit error for them — what they’d celebrate as ‘close enough’ after a long 2-minute shift on-air — but it’s 2 hours more on the snowblower for me. Heavy rain and hail coming “out of nowhere, Folks” is another beloved classic. So, when (not if) they are inevitably wrong, even the streaky guys quickly blame inconsistency between the European versus the US models, the Ocean effect, some cold front (or whatever comes from Canada these days) or El Nino, which sure feels like a thinly veiled effort to deflect blame onto immigrant cumulus clouds coming from the South. That being said, ‘mucho caliente’ is an apt description of the sizzling hot air the weather team releases on TV every half hour. As such, extrapolating the combined volume of forecasting across channels, countries and continents, perhaps this guessing trade should be investigated as a contributing factor for the very climate change they correctly focus on ? - just saying.

In summary, if I may, I want you to ‘report’ the weather, not ‘sell’ it.

If you feel you’re a standup comedian at heart — more power to you — then try out for a special on Netflix — but get the f*ck off my screen. For a job description that seems like a glorified cross between looking presentable as early as 5:00 am and fluent cue card reading while waving in front of a green screen, I would only ask to matter-of-factually communicate the few essential data known — without the cholesterol-boosting cheese. Much obliged.

© Tom Deisboeck, 2022. All Rights Reserved.