Forecast calls for snow with a gale of hype

It’s a line that we in the journalism business have always used to defend the bad news we package each day for public consumption: Don’t shoot the messengers, we’re only reporting what happened.

When it comes to reporting the weather, though, an exception could be made.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really think we should shoot the weather messengers. Across the country, TV weather people seem to be a bright, hardworking lot, for the most part, often with the most exuberant personalities and a passion for their subject that borders on obsession. Sometimes they even get it just right. But after the widespread angst created by this week’s epic nor’easter blizzard that turned out to be a relatively minor footnote to winter, the weather people might consider doing us all a big favor by reining in their enthusiasm for disaster just a bit.

Advanced forecasting technology is the blessing and the curse. On the one hand, it provides the National Weather Service and those who feed off it with an ever-widening window on developing storm patterns. On the other hand, it can’t say with any certainty whether the burgeoning storm that’s being tracked so fervently for three straight days will actually materialize as the sophisticated weather models predict.

And since we still can’t do anything about the weather, aren’t we merely being given a longer and longer amount of time to fret over it unnecessarily? Except for the boon to hardware stores that make a killing on shovel and salt sales and supermarkets that can’t keep bread, milk or toilet paper on the shelves, what the heck is the benefit of all this increasing weather hype and hysteria we so willingly succumb to these days?

“Basically, we’re measuring this in feet, not inches,” a meteorologist for the National Weather Service said more than two days before the first flake was expected to fall on a region stretching from Baltimore to Boston. Once the dire tone was set, people all over the East Coast anxiously plugged themselves into the Weather Channel – the MTV of the boomer generation – to watch a big white smudge chug ominously eastward across a map, snap back to where it started, and chug eastward again, over and over, like a nasty NFL instant replay.

Sufficiently alarmed by the fevered predictions of the worst snowstorm in decades, officials in the metropolitan region, at a cost of many millions of dollars, canceled hundreds of airplane flights, banned tractor-trailer trucks from the highways, closed schools and government offices and urged workers to stay home.

Long before there was any indication that the potential storm would even reach Portland, many residents of Bangor and north dutifully kicked into survival mode.

“Everybody’s freakin’ out,” said a harried young checkout clerk at the Shaw’s in Bangor, which was crowded with worried shoppers during Monday’s mild and entirely unstormy evening. Around town, people eagerly swapped the latest snowfall predictions, which ranged from 5 inches to 36, depending on the expert source.

“The radio station I listened to said it had a fudge factor of two feet, which sounded about right,” said a woman I spoke with at the gym.

While we Mainers prepared for the worst – whatever that might turn out to be – TV weather reporters scurried around New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia in a desperate search for severe weather to stand bravely in the middle of while doing their spots on the nightly news. When they couldn’t find a decent storm anywhere, they felt betrayed.

One New York TV reporter wondered on the air whether we were all facing “a snowstorm or a snowjob.” ABC anchorman Peter

Jennings asked “OK, what’s with the hype?” in his on-line column and then went on to blame “wild, manic reporting” for whipping up a very expensive and completely unnecessary frenzy over nothing much at all.

By early Tuesday morning, one TV weather expert sounded almost disappointed as he tried to explain what happened to that mountain of snow that never showed up.

“They didn’t collide,” he said of the those two large fronts that simply did not perform according to the computer script that had been carefully written for them days earlier.

Al Roker, that jolliest of national weatherpersons, managed a big toothy smile as he shrugged off the huge miscalculation. Despite all the weather satellites and the fancy Doppler radar equipment at his disposal, he explained, forecasting “is still an inexact science.”

Well, at least he got that right.