Ever wonder whether the weather will be wet here or not?
For most people, talking about the weather is synonymous with chitchat, the easiest way of holding conversation between two people who have nothing in common or nothing interesting to say.
For Josh Classen, it's not just a profession, it's a way of life. The meteorologist with CTV Edmonton has had his head in the clouds for many years now, and he knows very well the challenges of being a dependable weather fortune-teller.
Especially now, he says, when almost anybody can become a forecaster. A person could pursue a career in weather by taking the same three-year correspondence course from Mississippi State University that Classen did. Or, one could be a casual but informed observer by studying information now available on the Internet. He calls this the "democratization" of satellite reports and atmospheric data: the information is readily available to any and all members of the public who want it.
Even though Edmonton was one of the first markets in the country to have a serious weather person, once the Internet came along, it didn't take long for a population explosion in meteorologists. Now, there are several meteorologists in the capital region. CTV itself has more than one trained weatherperson on staff.
"Once the Internet came around and once everything became publicly available, there was no reason why the TV and radio stations couldn't hire their own meteorologist to do all their own in-house work. All of a sudden, everybody had their own forecast."
That also means that there are more people out there talking about the weather, leading to more predictions to believe or disbelieve.
The sky is falling … or not
Meteorology doesn't mean the study of meteors. The meaning comes from the Greek word referring to something lofty or high in the sky. Meteorologists are people who stand on the ground and try to understand what's going on thousands of metres above their heads.
Modern meteorologists like Classen have to rely on information feeds coming from weather satellites. He observes reports and analyzes them for things like atmospheric air pressure, cloud cover, humidity, and a variety of other factors.
David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, got his start about 40 years ago. His expert opinion is that forecasting is mostly one big guessing game.
"There is no such thing as guaranteed weather in Canada," he says. "It could be in Malta or Cyprus where people just worry about the sky being a little bluer from one day to the next … but we're a country that has the greatest temperature ranges this side of Venus."
"When you have the possibility of being absolutely balmy temperatures up to 15 or 16 degrees whereas it could be minus 15 or minus 16 and either one is equally possible, it just shows you the challenge of getting it right," he said. "It all depends on which way the wind blows."
The centre of the storms
Classen's office at CTV has a fine window view to the parking lot and a bank of large satellite dishes. Inside, it's well lit with a clean desk and a poster of all of the different types of clouds on the wall.
There are also six computers with nine monitors, plus a large screen TV, a laptop and an iPad. A TV camera on a tripod stands like a royal guard in one corner, just waiting for a storm to roll through so that Classen or weekend weather person Richard Ozero have to do live updates right from the crow's nest.
While Classen spends most of his time ignoring what's happening in the skies right outside his window, he rotates from computer to computer, checking data from different sources.
Phillips remarks: "A lot of the public thinks, if the weather people only look out the window, they'd probably get a little bit more accurate in their forecasts. It's not true. You don't have to look out the window to know what the weather is because of the kind of equipment we have and the remote sensing. The oceans can't burp without us knowing about it."
Compare and contrast
Being a weather person means that you have to be willing to accept infinitely complex variables leading to no small measure of unknowability while always striving for greater comprehension. People have been staring at the sky for millennia but meteorology has only been a serious scientific pursuit for a few hundred years. There is still the possibility that we don't know all of the variables, however, so the same information coming to several different sources seldom gets analyzed the same way with the same result.
For example, a sampling of several forecasts from various available local and international sources to see what the weather would be like even three days into the future produced these predictions for Wednesday:
• -10 C and sunny with an overnight low of -20 C — Environment Canada
• -9 C and mainly sunny with a 10 per cent chance of precipitation with an overnight low of -19 C — The Weather Network
• -4 C and sunny, with an overnight low of -7 C — Global TV Edmonton
• -7 C and mainly sunny with an overnight low of -13 C, — Josh Classen, CTV Edmonton
• -2 C and very cloudy with an overnight low of -6 C — WeatherForecastMap.com
• -4 C and partly cloudy, with an unchanged overnight low of -4 C, according to Microsoft's weather website, MSN.weather.com
• -12 C and sunny with an overnight low of -16 C — OpenWeather.com
• -9 C and mainly sunny with some winds and an overnight low of -13 C, — AccuWeather.com
• 0 C and mostly cloudy with a 10 per cent chance of precipitation and some winds, with an overnight low of -5 C — The Weather Channel at Weather.com.
There is a 10-degree difference in the range of predictions for the daytime high and a 15-degree difference for the nighttime low. It could either be 0 C or -10 C at its warmest, and -5 C or -20 C at its coldest. It could be sunny or cloudy, with winds, or maybe some precipitation.
It's exactly this kind of fluctuation in forecasts that has led one American-based website to start doing scientific comparisons of all of the weather predictions for specific cities. While it doesn't operate in Canada, Weatherist.com offers what it calls a "five-day most probable forecast" for several American cities. It also ranks each of the city's forecasters on a leader board for success rates. The best one for Minneapolis is 90 per cent accurate.
Because of all of the known and unknown variables — not the least of which is the scientific acumen and intuition of each individual forecaster — Phillips says that it's almost impossible to state with 100 per cent confidence that the weather will be one way or the other as you look into the future.
"It always comes down to the farther you look ahead, the more uncertain you're going to be."
To give some added perspective, Classen's forecast last Thursday called for Wednesday's weather to be a high of -4 C and a low of -10 C. By Sunday, that had changed to -7 C and -13 C. By Monday, it had become -12 C and -17 C.
Even though Classen himself says that he stands by his 10-day forecast, things can change depending on which way the wind blows.
As Stephanie Barsby, meteorologist with CBC Radio, says, "There's a lot of analysis that goes into being a meteorologist and sometimes it doesn't go exactly according to plan, but more often than not, it does."
