A-L-E-X

It comes down to what many people say here alot, especially Steve D...you have to be looking at the satellite/radar images with an unbiased eye 12-24 hours from the event, very often you will see things that tell you something is going differently...its less an issue now with the great models we have but 20+ years ago it was way more useful...The Dec 89 storm was a disaster because it was obvious by 2-3pm that afternoon if you looked at the satellite imagery that the low was going to develop way west....its remarkable to this day how badly that event was handled by the models and the forecasts....the warnings for 5-8 inches were not dropped til midnight.

I guess (non)"events" like that do become memorable (and historic in a sense) for the very reason that they were such big busts. The funny thing is that bust would have probably not been remembered very well had the actual storm happened, but the bust actually made it memorable and even historic. Was that in a remnant La Nina pattern? I remember you said that storms are harder to forecast in mod-strong la ninas (the storm from the previous Feb is another example of a famous la nina bust.)

We saw forecasts playing catchup on storms increasing accumulations late such as the 96 blizzard, the 12/09 storm, and most recently the 12/26/10 event...this was a case where the forecasts were desperately playing catchup the other direction...many meteorologists knew the morning the storm started when it was raining that it was going to be a bust but it was taking seemingly forever for that message to get through to the media.

SG, it reminds me of the busts of old-- like back in the 80s (Im sure you remember the Dec 89 storm, when we were forecast to get a foot of snow and ended up with a quick changeover to rain..... this came on the heels of the infamous Feb 89 fiasco.)

This thread is pretty much a disgrace.

Theyre just getting you prepped for the Yankee thread next spring, Mike.

Yes, there are indeed great mets from all backgrounds. My only point is that at this time white males still make up the majority of met grads, at least 70-80% I'd say. But if they are only getting 50% or so of the jobs because of affirmative action I don't think that's fair. Its like title 9 - If 70% of those wanting to play high school sports are boys simply because to this day boys are generally more into sports, then 70% of high school sports teams should be boys teams, not the 50% that title 9 tries to artificially enforce.

Exactly..... the fact that people still discriminate based on what they see with their eyes says much more about them then it says about the people they are discriminating against.

I wouldn't even focus on him being stereotypical of the Asian students per say...just that generally the rule is good in math and theory, terrible forecaster....good forecaster, terrible with the math and theory...not always true but true more than 50% of the time...whether its 50.01%, 88.9%, 63.5% etc. I don't know but I'd bet the house its over a 50% correlation for sure.....the smartest people unfortunately often have trouble grasping very basic concepts and social skills...I have such a hard time understanding how someone can be unable at the age of 30 or 40 to hold a 5 minute normal conversation but sadly many PhDs out there in ALL fields, not just meteorology do.

Its actually a really big problem in all the sciences, because the need to be able to communicate is fundamental-- otherwise each specialty becomes compartmentalized and convoluted and causes scientists to have no idea what is going on in terms of progress in fields outside their specialty (and sometimes even within.) Some of which could actually benefit their own line of work.

It's actually better now-- before the internet, I dont even want to think about how bad it was back then.