More than one friend sent me a link to a Yahoo! story today about how rainy forecasts are misunderstood. The article contends that only half of the population fully understands what the visual forecast icons and percentages mean.

What do I mean by visual forecasts?

Tuesday has a 50% chance of showers. What does that even mean? Let’s look at another example.

Monday and Tuesday of next week have a 40 and 50 percent chance of rain, respectively.

What confused people is what the percentage actually stands for. Many surveyed thought by saying “there is a 50% chance of rain” means that it will rain for half the day or only half the area will get rain. Although I can see what they are thinking, they are unfortunately wrong. The saying “50% chance” means given the atmospheric conditions at this time, half the time it rains and half the time it doesn’t.

As seen in the survey, this is a very common misconception. Meteorologists may not do a good enough job explaining this feature of the forecast. Some people don’t even use “chances of” on their extended forecasts.

My former boss at WTNH and good friend Geoff Fox never puts percentages on his 8-day forecasts. It is misleading to people, he would say. It took me a couple of days to understand what he meant.   A good communicator is just as powerful as an icon. Geoff does a great job of explaining each tricky forecast so not to mislead any viewers.

Next time you hear “there is a chance of rain” you’ll know what the meteorologist is talking about…even if we are only right 50% of the time.

I am an avid writer and I often find fun things to write about on other websites. One of those websites I frequent is Twitter. Twitter is a pseudo social networking sight with mini blogging capabilities. If you think writing a text message was hard with 160 characters, Twitter restricts you to only 140 characters. Try summarize what you’re doing or thinking in one sentence… it’s not easy!

Anyway, so as I was on Twitter this afternoon/evening, I started noticing a common factor. Many of the people I was following were tweeting (posting a twitter message) about the weather. It’s not like they didn’t have a huge spectrum to comment about. The picture above is a snap shot of what was happening. Everything from tornado warnings in red, blizzard warnings in orange, and flood warnings in green.

That got me thinking. Are we at a time that we no longer are content with hearing about weather warnings from the chief meteorologist at your favorite TV station? We no longer pay attention to the alerts as they scroll across our screen? Do people still tune into their NOAA radios?

As many people know, I currently work at WeatherBug. We do have the desktop application that was very revolutionary at its inception. Now folks at work or in front of the computer could receive near real-time alerts as soon as they’re issued.

The chirping WeatherBug app is still as strong as ever, but I do see a competitor from Twitter. Check out a screen capture from my twitter feed.

Not only did many of these warnings come out in real-time, but they lack the generic tone of a NWS alert. If I lived in North Carolina (and weren’t a meteorologist) today, I would have sat in my basement with my wireless internet and continually pressed refresh on twitter for updates.

I think it will be very interesting to see how Twitter will effect the news-delivering in the upcoming few years. Before you forget, click on the button to the right and add us to your Twitter!

What a week it has been for weather across the country.

Central Plains: Just when residents of the Central Plains thought spring was starting, they were in for a rude awakening. Last week temperatures were above average for the entire region, some places reaching 60º (15º above average). That warm feeling and the belief spring was coming left faster than you can say sublimation. Beginning Monday morning, a strong system delivered late season blizzard conditions, dumping between 6 inches and a staggering 37 inches across Wyoming. To make matters even worse, now the residents are dealing with some of the worst flooding in recent memory. The National Weather Service issued a Civil Emergency Message saying

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Elm River at Westport has reached all time record levels. As a result, the Elm River has begun to flow into the northern portion of Moccasin Creek.

This is not a good situation for those folks and it will continue to get worse. There are reports of bridges collapsing and entire interstate highways completely closed.

South: As I go for the award for “Worst Transition Ever”, those same snow storms previously mentioned spawned tornadoes across Texas and Arkansas. This phenomenon isn’t as rare as you’d think. About once a year, a strong low pressure system moves in from the west, bringing a grab bag of weather to any state in its path. On the southern end of this storm, you will many times find severe thunderstorms. These thunderstorm soaked southern locations with up to 6 inches of rain.

Alaska: As you may or may not have heard, there is a volcano erupting to the southeast of Anchorage. In fact, I’d be willing to but that if Sarah Palin looked out her back door, she could see volcanic ash rising into the sky. On a serious note, the melting of glaciers caused by the eruption has in turn caused seriously flooding concerns for Alaskan officials. Rivers are up as much as 25 feet above normal heights with the dirty as mixing with the water.

The week isn’t over yet, and the east coast will have some rain showers all day tomorrow. At least there isn’t 2 feet of snow or a volcano right?

The day has come that every meteorologist lives for. Accuweather has finally issued its yearly 2009 hurricane forecast. Now it gives us something to talk about until the end of hurricane season.

This years’ forecast looks strikingly similar to last years’. Joe Bastardi, Accuweather’s leading hurricane expert, predicted an increase of tropical storm presence from the Carolinas to New England. He was correct in that count - Hurricane Hanna and TS Cristobal.

I think it’s pretty funny that they say “probably more random activity” for the East Coast. Could you get any less specific?

He also predicted a normal year for the Gulf of Mexico. Texas seemed to be the punching bag for Mother Nature last year with three hurricane landfalls. Hurricanes Edouard, Dolly, and Ike (with Gustav in the neighborhood) did extreme damage to the Texas coast. I think he was a little off there.

Bastardi does know his stuff though. In 2007, he was found to have the most accurate hurricane forecast.

This year he is forecasting thirteen tropical storms to form, four hurricanes hitting the US, and one hitting the US as a major hurricane. This is a considerably less than previous years.

Stay tuned for the official 4cast4you Hurricane Forecast! Coming soon!