LATEST LETTERS

Weather stats wrong

Monday, October 29 at 10:42 AM

Richard Johnson of Denver writes:

Pardon my suspicions but, again official weather stats and newspaper reports are again so obviously inaccurate why is it allowed to continue unoppossed? Our weekend snowstorm. Sand trucks on the street. Accident alerts posted. Broken tree limbs and downed power lines. And the official story for the snowstorm...a trace of snow with .11” of precipitation. Right!! Is some group or ideology successfully manipulating Denver’s snow/rain precip stats. Oh,no, no, no. A little honesty in reporting...please.

This letter has not been edited.

READER COMMENTS

I sure miss Stormy Rottman.

Posted by on October 29, 2007 03:08 PM

I want to hear weatherman Bowman and hi trough aloft again.
we could get real weather reporting but so much of it depends on how the global warming thing is working that day

Posted by on October 29, 2007 04:21 PM

ditto on the Stormy

Posted by Harry on October 29, 2007 05:00 PM

In my part of town (near DIA) we didn't have much snow, the roads were fine, no tree limbs fell. There really seemed to be no ill effect. But forecast for further south in the metro area was worse. So maybe Richard lives down there? My understanding is that the official numbers reported are from Stapleton, so what was reportedly reported seems reasonable to me.

Posted by Mike S. on October 29, 2007 08:43 PM

I've lived all over the country, and weather reports here are a joke. Too large of an area with too many geographic differences to be able to have a general forecase like we had in Chicago and D.C. I go to the web and type in my zip and any zips I'm going to that day to find out what's up for that particular neighborhood.

Posted by Mac on October 29, 2007 10:03 PM

I've lived in Denver all my life and the weather forecasting has consistently gotten worse.

Forecasts can differ by as much as 12-degrees among Denver media with one showing a clear sun and another a cloud for the same day. Don't they get the same feeds from the National Weather Service? Isn't the same NEXRAD WSR-88 data distributed among the users?

And since when did personalized comments such as "pleasantly warm," "terribly cold" and "feels like 60" become vogue terms in predicting atmospheric phenomena?

I think it's time to drop the manipulation and cutsy weather chicks and start using solid meteorological tools, models and methodology to predict the weather while leaving the childish games in LoDo.

Oh, how I miss weatherman Bowman.

Posted by Vector180 on October 30, 2007 10:19 AM

Uh, people, do a bit of research. Official snow totals are tallied at the old Stapleton site, and all other official weather information is taken from sensors at DIA. True, it is usually the case that weather data presented as official differs, at times greatly, from what has been reported, depending on the location of the individual observer. But then again, it is completely unrealistic to expect that the weather in Highlands Ranch is the same as the weather at DIA, if for no other reason than geographic disparaties between the two sites. The main reason for the official weather figures being taken at DIA is that weather information is extremely important to the aviation industry, for safety's sake.

Look at it this way: Where should official weather information be taken at? Winds are almost always higher in the northwest suburbs. Temparatures tend to be cooler and there tends to be more precipitation in the southern suburbs, especially those closer to the mountains. The City and County of Denver is caught in the heat island effect as it is the metropolitan core. In other words, there is no good place to take weather information that covers a good portion of the metro area.

The obvious answer would be to have official weather stations for the different areas of the Denver metro area, accessible by ZIP code. But, people in Colorado are cheapskates (see the TABOR Amendment and associated nonsense), and refuse to even pay for passable roads and bridges in the state, heaven forbid for a world-class higher education system. The chances of the state and/or municipial governments, or even DRCOG, paying for such stations is nil, since the voters would never dream of approving it. You get what you pay for (or refuse to pay for), folks. Quit your bitching, or do something about it. But then again, that would be the sensible thing to do, wouldn't it?

Posted by FU All on October 30, 2007 02:57 PM

Hey bozos.

Precipitation is a liquid measurement. That means how much water is left when the snow melts. There really wasn't that much snow so I would say one-tenth of an inch of liquid water sounds about right.

Remember when it snows while there are leaves on the trees (Like in October or May) you get more broken limbs.

Jeez what a bunch of morons.

Posted by D on October 30, 2007 03:15 PM

D, you've been sniffing farts again! Go sit in the car.

Posted by on November 1, 2007 10:15 AM