It appears to me that today's meteorologist have a plethora of weather forecasting tools and models in their arsenal, however they sure enough struggle in Central Illinois to 'get-it-right.' Okay, I am not going to turn this rant into a slam-job on television weather persons. First, it's too easy to do that and secondly, I never did care much for second-guessers.
I did notice some time ago that my local weather-guy is now giving a forecast referencing two different 'models.' There is the U. S. Model and the European Model. Since I've been watching television weathermen dating back to the early 1950's what was once a 3-minute T.V. Gig is now about seven minutes of the 30-minutes news-weather & sports programming. I can't say the 'predicting' factor has improved but they sure do have a lot of fancy colorful charts theses days...and we seem to 'measure' everything. We have temperature, wind-chill, heat index, rain gages, snow amounts, baramoter, wind speed, pollen counts, i.e. Mold, tree and grasses. Just this week, I saw a new chart for the coming summer months: The 'muggy meter.' I suppose the weather guy wishes to rate our degree of humidity toleration. One chart broke it down into three categories: (1) slightly clammy, (2) uncomfortable and (3) 'don't tell me fanning makes me hotter!'
I believe the best weather description I ever hear over the airways was from the late great Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, Dizzy Dean when he was broadcasting St. Louis Browns' games during the Second World War. Because our country was at war the government made it illegal to give verbal weather conditions of any major American city. Well, sure enough the Browns were hosting Cleveland in 1943 when there was a thunder storm causing a game delay. Old Diz said, '"Folks, we got ourselves a little interruption in play now but I can't tell ya'll just why that is. So I'm gunna tell you to get up out-the-chair and mosey to the back door and stick your head out...you'll soon finger it all out."
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