Weather
Weather WisdomWeather Wisdom - Friday, May 29, 2009By Craig Koplien
“Just tell me if it’s going to rain or not!”
That’s what I hear from so many people when my forecast includes the words “chance”, “slight chance”, “good chance” or “likely”. While most of the time I can be fairly certain whether we will get rain during an upcoming 24 hour period, I usually can’t be 100% certain when looking at time frames further out than that. No one can. Despite the advancements made in forecasting over the years, we still don’t have the expertise to make calls of absolutely yes or no on rainfall much more than a day in advance. We have to speak in terms of probabilities, odds and chances. Weather forecasting is not an exact science. Maybe someday it will be. Perhaps someday it will be as exact as math, for example. We all know that two plus two is always four, and ten times ten is always one hundred. But forecasting is a little more like diagnosing a medical problem. Sometimes doctors do tests on a patient, determine exactly what is wrong and know exactly how to treat it. But other times, doctors aren’t able to diagnose an illness. Or if they are, there isn’t a treatment that is certain to cure it.
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