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Sure Cuevas missed this one. But come on, I never see you give him credit the many days he is right about the forecast. A couple weeks ago, he forecasted the storm well. Did anyone here give him any credit? I don’t recall.
anon…. too many Seminole and Gator fan transplants, that’s why!
<g>
can someone explain why, when it snows every single year at least a little, this whole area shuts down at the prediction of it? other places in the world with just as varying terrain get snow and go on with 2 feet….why must we cripple under 1/2 inch…every year?
I guess all you guys would be happier if we were blanketed with 18 inches of snow and were stuck at home for the next three days. When its wintertime and a snowstorm misses you, it’s good news.
get over it. cuevas screwed up again, so did the national weather service, so did the weather channel, and you always leave out the citizen-times. the headline on today’s front page reads "WNC braces for first major winter storm". The story includes all the what to do crap that WLOS did. So spread the irritation please.
Amen, Ron.
I do not watch the TV. Don’t miss it one bit.
I don’t even know what most of the WLOSers look like, don’t care to find out and probably never will.
I stopped watching just because of idiocy like this.
Long Island is another place they can’t forecast weather properly the nearness of mountains, sea and huge barrier islands make (believe it or not) an even harder prediction than Ashvegas.
I don’t agree we need to panic those prone to such attacks. I think it is all based on "back in the day" things when there were no interstates, big bridges over rivers, huge road cuts which straightened curvy mountain pass roads, et cetera.
Yes, I remember spending the night in my Grandpa’s Dodge stranded between Bat Cave and Asheville, in those days that was the only way over those hills.
So, yeah, if, IF, you live up around 5k feet at the headwaters of a creek, up 8 miles of curvy USFS road 14 road miles from the nearest Ingles, then yeah… you might have cause to worry.
The rest of us, not so much.
April 1998 we had a freak storm that brought several inches of snow. That was our last decent snowstorm, I think. I remember that one because I was preggers and I remember walking through the woods in snow drifts to my knees and getting rather breathless. Fun!
Apologies to you and also to Mish; the earlier comment credited to her is actually mine. And it’s been snowing down here in Henderson for about an hour as of 11:55.
Ash, I understand your frustration. In a perfect world, they would assign a level of probability (i.e., 40% chance of snow accumulations of 3 – 5 inches, 30% chance of a sleet/snow mix with less than one inch, etc), but that would confuse many viewers. Some would choose to hear only the least dire forecast, and proceed to make foolish decisions that could be dangerous or live-threatening.
Except perhaps for psychiatry, meteorolgy is the least exact of sciences; it creates differing scenarios based on previous events and assigns an appropriate level of probability to each. Then they pick one or two. There are too many variables in forecasting to expect that they will always be correct. And WNC is a more difficult place than most to get it right.
I’m reminded of the Great Hurricane of 1938, back in the days before there was any meaningful weather forecasting. A hurricance moved up the Eastern seaboard and then moved out to sea, which is not unusual. It was thought to be several hundred miles out in the Atlantic and was therefore harmless. Actually, it was strengthening and heading back toward Long Island and New England, where a beautiful day suddenly turned dark and stormy. No one was even expecting rain, when a Category 5 hurricane slammed into the low-lying shore communities of Long Island and, worst of all, Rhode Island. Within a matter of hours hundreds perished. There was no warning of any kind.
No surprise hurricanes are bearing down on WNC, but people die if you don’t get their attention and warn them of the potential dangers. And if you get tired of watching the storm coverage, you can always turn off the television.
Jeremias, i can’t remember the last time we got more than 3 or 4 inches. i consider 6 inches "significant."
bill, that’s just crazy.
Jody, yes!
amen, techstar.
realityczek – you didn’t read what we said in the post. the difference between newspapers and television is that newspapers go to the experts to collect their information, while the television weather people hold THEMSELVES out as the experts. the experts were wrong.
mish, the problem with the Cry Wolf worst-case-scenario type of reporting is that you lose credibility that way and people stop listening. what good is Cuevas’ training if he can’t interpret the information and tell us with some degree of accuracy what’s going to happen? why do they call it their "futurecast" when it’s really a "full-of-crap-cast"? we despise the conceit of it all. just be honest. that’s all we ask.
we’re just going to start calling for plague and pesitilence. Mount Mitchell is going to blow and the French Broad River is going to start flowing the other way. we predict fire raining from the sky, unrelenting tsunamis and massive typhoons.
that will be our standard forecast, and we’ll be right just as much as the WLOSers.
I’m not one to defend WLOS, its agents and/or assignees, but I don’t think you can blame them or Cuevas for blowing this one. The National Weather Service continued to issue dire predictions until after midnight (I get their alerts by e-mail, as anyone can). While Cuevas may interpret the radar screeens and review the NWS advisories, neither he nor any other meteorologits are likely to contradict the type of advisories we were seeing. And the storm was bearing down on us, as predicted, until well after midnight.
I’m no expert, but the unpredictability of the weather here in WNC is a fact of life, regardless of the season. The combination of the mountains, altitude and prevailing weather patterns makes prediction more difficult than most locales. Would it be better if they said that they didn’t know what would happen? I don’t think so. It’s better to be prepared for the worse-case scenario, to remind people of the dangers, and to make sure they have a day or two of food in the house. And they were relying on the best available info from the NWS.
Do they hype these storms? You bet. I hate it as much as anyone. But if they save a life or two it’s probably worth it.
Here’s what drives me crazy – and ALL of the stations did it last night…
IF the weather is going to be bad, give me the meteorologist at the top of the newscast for longer than one minute, and don’t be too quick to jump to the footage of the %$#@ grocery store and state trucks "getting ready for treacherous conditions..".
I could be wrong, but I can almost assure you that viewers are not at home saying, "Boy, I hope 90 seconds into the newscast they’ll show me how busy Ingles is…"
I could be wrong.
Didn’t the Citizen Times "blow it" too? I think so. Come on Ash.. a little equal opportunity blogging would be nice!
Yeah this morning Caldwell seemed a bit humbled. A couple times blathered on about "you just can’t predict just how much we’ll get". It’s ridiculous. I’ve lived here for 5 years now. Only one time that I can remember did we actually get more snow than they predicted (that freak snowstorm in April 2003 I believe). You would think that the law of averages would say they’d be wrong on the high side and wrong on the low side each 50% of the time. It’s more like wrong on the low side 98% of the time.
It is 9:15 on Thursday morning. I demand that WLOS bring Susan Mundy inside right now! She does not deserve to stand at some nameless 4-lane intersection and have to ad-lib about nothing-
This station has scared A’ville schools into closing for the day…WTF!
Well now I am really sorry I wrecked my camera by falling in a creek last week.
I just saw, with my own eyes… Dump Trucks with CHAINS on, with not a flake of snow in sight.
Not only that, the dumptrucks had plows on the front and were loaded with sand.
I have never, ever, ever seen anything like this in my entire life.
This place is nutty.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the last substantial snow we got back in 1997? I know we’ve had two or three inches here and there, but wasn’t that the last time we got anything that shut down the city? Yet upstate South Carolina and Charlotte continue to get it. {Sigh…}