I am a meteorologist and a former youth leader at church…I have a lot to say on both subjects…and then some
It’s been a while. I have pretty much given up on my Northern Michigan Recreational Weather Blog, and started to blog from here again. A lot of that has to do with WordPress.com charging to embed YouTube videos. Since this is a self-funded blog site, under my wife’s business, I started to do my Coffee and a Weather Map series. However, that has had to be put on hold since the summer, when we moved into a 5th wheel. I haven’t done much with it mainly due to bandwidth issues, and, while in Florida, I lost my Apple Pencil. Since we moved into a cottage south of Gaylord, Our bandwidth, hasn’t improved by much, and now we have power constraint issues. However, on a whole, things have been going well.
However, what first started this post was a comment on the office Facebook page that irked me from a storm that went through the region toward the beginning of the month.
The comment was something along the lines of “with all this technology you’d think we would get better forecasts.”
Blah. My emotional response would have been to sarcastically point out how much better forecasting is since when I got into the business over 30 years ago. I remained calm and moved ahead, ignoring the comment.
I remember being in awe as the NGM (Nest Grid Model) picked up that a wave would produce an east coast storm 48 hours in advance of it hitting anything. Now, we can generally see out 6 or 7 days, although not all the time, and see the possibility of something coming.
That extra time we have now, must be messaged properly so that people will know what to do. However, most of the public can only ask how much snow is going to fall in x city, when there are still lots of uncertainties. We try to message things generally when a system is 5 days out. We try to not get into too much detail since the path track of a storm will change and fluctuate, sometimes by 100s of miles, when within the last 12 hours, the track may be off by 25 miles, and producing more or less snow than was predicted for some locations.
Luckily, we have people who like our work and come to our defense siting their snow fall and the prediction. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to the generally ignorant comments on social media, but every once in a while…
The Severe Storm Prediction Center (SPC) has given us slight risk of severe storms overnight. Check out this link to the NWS Gaylord, MI Web Story.
Check out the Facebook page for some of the links. I’ll be watching the stuff and probably update via my Posterous.com site. I’ll see if I can tag it for this site and watch my Facebook or Twitter feeds for the links to it.
The graphic and the link are such that the forecast will be updated all the time. So if you need a forecast click the picture, it will take you to the Hazardous Weather Briefing, from there you can go the NWS Gaylord, MI homepage and click on the map at your house and get a forecast just for you. Also, check out my page of weather links here on my web site.
Enjoy!
Lake effect!
Usually, when I read something about climate change from Discovery Channel, it usually goes out and talks about man-made global warming. Sorry, but with my background in atmospheric science, there are too many things that the climate models lack to attribute things all to man’s disregard to taking care of the planet. However, this article surprised me. A good read for most laypeople.
My boss sent this around on email. I kept wanting to yell, “let go!”
Well, with a mere $549, I will own an Eee PC. On this pc is a built in Web cam and I think a microphone. Because of this, I may take a stab at a few things for podcast/vidcasting. It may not be pretty, but it will get me to see what I need to do to get everything rolling for my audio and video productions. So I have opened a Ustream.tv account 
. So keep watching the blog for new stuff.
