Sunday, October 25, 2015

The NWS "Weather Story" This Morning


I can not resist venting a bit after seeing this weather story from NWS Tucson this morning. The pretty graphics and colorful cartoons that many/most NWS Forecast Offices are producing for users these days are too often superficial and lacking in technical explanation.

What is shown on these two weather maps? What are the yellow lines? What does the colored shading mean? Certainly no explanations are provided in this "story."

And my pet peeve - what does "a piece of energy" mean? If a user goes to the NWS Glossary of technical terms to find out what this means they will be out of luck, since there are no entries for "energy" nor "piece of energy". No explanations of what kind of "energy" is being discussed are provided by the writer. Unfortunately, more and more forecasters seem to be using the "energy" term, which is essentially meteorological gibberish or jargon. 

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