Francis,
I just realized that you are probably the person who can answer a question I have long had. It concerns the "weatherpersons" on TV. Are these people usually just broadcasters who drew the short (or long!) straw and were assigned to report the weather, or are they usually degreed meteorologists? I know that the real answer is "It varies", but what is the general situation?
thanx
Since Frank hasn't answered (yet), I will say a bit about this.
Where I live, the weathermen are all degreed meteorologists (maybe some of the substitutes are just newsreaders, but the main people are not). In fact, this is one trend in TV news I find very encouraging- the days of cute girls reading the NWS forecast are gone, replaced by people who can give a meaningful discussion of the data, rather than just stating a forecast.
In fact, the various stations compete on the basis of more accurate forecasts, which implies they each have their own (which presumably substantially agree, but with some variation).
>the forecaster from "KELO Land" who was also Captain Eleven <
Pat Sajak, the host of Wheel of Fortune, was the weatherman on one of the stations here in LA in the mid 70s. I would venture he makes a lot more on WoF than he did prognosticating the weather!
Thompson left CNN less than a year after she was hired. She's now on "24" occasionally, I believe (don't watch the show myself.)
A short bio appears at the URL below. This bio, like several others, says she posed nude in a magazine, but saying this is unfair without further detail. Makes it sound like she exposed herself in a men's magazine, but actually she appeared in "Black & White," a respected photography magazine marketed to the fine-art photography community:
http://www.netglimse.com/celebs/pages/andrea_thompson/index.shtml
>They had an on-scene meteorologist in Kansas City, reporting on the local heat. One morning -- no lie -- she reported: "It's still early in the morning and the temperature is already 90 degrees. The heat can only get worse as the sun rises through the atmosphere." <
Judging from when you weren't here, I'd guess that was monday. Tuesday it was 80 at dawn and, as the sun rose through the atmosphere, the temperature dropped to 75 at noon. Then the clouds came, then the rain, and it was 70 at 3:00- 32 degrees cooler than twenty hours previous. This developement was greatly appreaciated. As were the low-fifties dewpoints as opposed to the upper seventies of last friday.
When I most recently watched the weather channell they were sending people out to stand in a hurricane and tell us that it was very windy.
<< A short bio appears at the URL below. This bio, like several others, says she posed nude in a magazine, but saying this is unfair without further detail. Makes it sound like she exposed herself in a men's magazine, but actually she appeared in "Black & White," a respected photography magazine marketed to the fine-art photography community: >>
Also, it seems from the bio on the link you posted that she was a professional model at the time, and she later changed professions. That seems a bit different from a "professional weather babe" posing as part of "gals of CNN" or whatever.
Still, in my opinion, a much healthier society would spend no time worrying about outside activities of news readers, while demanding that politicians conduct all of their professional activities in the nude. (Perhaps excepting the tie, which could be color coded to indicate the politician's party, so that we could determine which one to root for without actually having to listen to them.)
But that is totally off thread...
Tom
My wife and I have a hypothesis that all the TWC babes are constantly pregnant, the only question being whether or not they're showing yet. In fact, this extends to local weathergirls.
More substantively, I do agree that the weather guy having a meteorology degree doesn't mean he knows squat. While getting my degree I met many other people who graduated college and am well aware of how little expertise in your major is actually implied. Only during tornado warnings are the TV guys my first source for weather, and only because they are more real-time than the NOAA site, which is my main source, backed by wunderground. On top of that I listen to the local guy I've decided is best to hear his discussion After all, as little as a BS indicates, he's also been on the job a while and has a good track record with his forecast. His secret? Go outside before airtime and look at the clouds (and also feel the air(movement)). When I get better educated I'll be better able to evaluate the discussion, but I like to think I know when a guy is at least telling a plausible story.
So there's actually a good reason for TWC to send their new hires out to wait for landfall and shows us what a hurricane is like ( I know, I remember Camille and particulary Agnes. Others too, but those were more memorable.) And similarly out standing in subzero weather to shiver on camera
My late interest in meteorology of course comes precisely from my working in weather. I should have paid attention when dad, a naval aviator turned sea commander, talked about clouds and weather (plus he grew up on a farm in the dust bowl, so he's seen the gamut of weather), but that wasn't the kind of science that interested me at the time. Now, while it may not be what my nature draws me too, at least I live in the lab. And anything is interesting if you take an interest in it;hence we have experts on plankton.
Completely on a different question, for years I remembered the torrential rains in Winfield Ks of 9-20,21-85 as having been the remnants of Gilbert. Wrong, that was the rain of 88. Thinking back (it was a very memorable weekend for many reasons, the weather being prominent), it was a very cold front pushing in on friday noon (that's when the rtetired air force pilot next to me taught me that the wind always changes when a front arrives, that's the giveaway) that spawned the nine inches in 48 hours. The question: how could I find weather records for that period? (Hmm, soon as I ask you a few new avenues occur to me. Maybe the Wichita eagle-Beacon keeps that data.)
Anyway, thanks for the discussion.
Thanks.
>It looks like they had a bit less than 1.5 inches on those two days.< I recall a wide disparity in rainfall readings, I think the highest I saw was around 8 inches, I think the Winfield airport reported five or something like that. It's been awhile. Wichita isn't far away, but as you know, rainfall can vary greatly over not a large area.
PS. I just found a weather archive for that location that weekend and, get this, they say we had less than a half inch. Absolute nonsense. Saturday, when they report a quarter inch, it rained persistently all day, all night, with periods of torrential rainfall. (I ran into an old friend about midnight, whom I never saw again, and we had to run to our respective shelter because the skys just opened up, after a long period of merely heavy rain). This report is off by an order of magnitude (4.1 is very believable, .41 just isn't. ) I'm sure it seemed worse because I was more or less outside the whole time, and also that over the years my memory has exaggerated it, but not from "intermittent showers" to "persistent deluge".
Are TV weatherpersons degreed meteorologists, or just generic broadcasters?
You left out the third possibility - cranks:
http://usatoday.com/weather/climate/2005-09-20-wacky-weatherman_x.htm
