What happens with the National Weather Service gets it wrong? It turns out, they won’t tell you, and will allow you to cower in fear in your apartment, terrified that you will be snowed in for days without food, water and access to all the benefits of civilization.
According to the Associated Press, the National Weather Service, which issues the meteorological proclamations that send Americans scrambling to load up on groceries they’ll never eat and enough toilet paper to turn the Statue of Liberty into a mummy, knew the “super-snowstorm” they were predicting for earlier in the week was overblown, but chose not to say anything.
Monday afternoon, weather experts in Boston, New York and Philadelphia gathered on a phone call to share computer model predictions of the storm they said could drop nearly two feet of snow on the Northeast. All the models “dramatically cut” snowfall predictions.
But the meteorologists agreed amongst themselves not to share their secret.
“Out of extreme caution we decided to stick with higher amounts,” said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations at the Weather Prediction Center in Maryland told AP. After all, he said, everyone was doing such a fine job of preparing, why should they stop? And who couldn’t use a work-from-home day?
The NWS claims that they thought telling people to expect less of a storm might give them the wrong idea, or lead them to believe the storm wasn’t threatening.
And, apparently, meteorologists are nervous about what they call the “windshield wiper effect;” dramatically changing forecasts leads the public to believe weather experts don’t know what they’re doing, eroding their trust in the profession.
Forcing cities and states to prepare for drastic snowfall, cancel school and send people home from their jobs, when the real weather report called for only a mere dusting of the white stuff—that’s also how to erode trust in the profession.
In true Heat Street tradition, of course, we do have another theory: perhaps the NWS, now a function of the Trump administration, was just trying to distract from news of a forthcoming investigation into the Trump campaign’s association with Russian officials.
We report, you decide.