Why are weather forecasters never held responsible for their bad predictions?

Question

If YOU made such horrible errors YOU'D still be in prison! How do they keep a straight face? And yet there they are, every day, never even mentioning the huge colossal lie they told the day before. Never apologizing for ruining your weekend when they told you it would be beautiful when in fact it rained for two days straight. How do they get away with it? Can you believe they actually get paid for pulling a forecast out of a hat?

Answer 1

It is not a lie, it is an ERROR.

Weather prediction is not an accurate science. What meteorologist do is check out what the weather is upwind, and assume that whatever is upwind will come down to you pushed by the wind. And to that, they have to factor in the effect of mountains that deflect the wind, bodies of water that change moisture, cloud cover that change the heat that is actually reaching the ground and radiating in space, and so on. They try their best to give accurate prediction, but this is all those are: prediction, with a certain % chance of being wrong.

If you are unhappy about their prediction, don't listen to them. It is your choice. You are not the one paying for them, are you?

Answer 2

It seems all answers stem from the fact of how difficult it is. I chose to look at it from a different point Suppose you run a Golf Club and the local weather man predicts a 60% chance of rain on the weekend. How many golfers make their plans on that and decide not to play? Who gets hurt when it doesn't rain? The golf club loses revenue it can never make up. Employees lose money because they are sent home early or not called in at all. The golf club is hurt financially by the weather man. This scenario is the same for any business that has weather as a concern. Any other business would sue the crap out of a person or business that caused that kind of financial hardship, but the weather man is always given a pass. Unfair

Answer 3

Modern day weather prediction is actually quite accurate, particularly in forecasts 1-3 days out. Forecasts further than 5 days out are less reliable, however, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Many people view weather forecasts as inaccurate because it is simply human nature to focus on the one time forecasters got it wrong and not so much on the 9 times they got it right.

This being said, many forecasters ARE held responsible for their forecasts. Forecasters at many agencies are evaluated by how accurate their forecasts are, and some can get fired if they are ineffective. However, this may not be true of your local television weathercaster; so long as they look good on TV and aren't receiving a lot of complaints, they may not be held accountable for bad forecasts, especially since some of them are actually professional broadcasters, NOT meteorologists.

Answer 4

The world's weather guessers typically get their information from the same sources. When those sources are wrong (which is about 20% of the time according to recent data), the weather guessers are wrong.

Many, if not most, of the weather guessers on TV and radio are not meteorologists; they are simply entertainment personalities stuck with the weather reports to give. Those unskilled people just simply do not have the education to second guess the sources supplying the weather data.

There are some trained meteorologists in TV and radio. They are usually introduced as "meteorologists" by the host (anchor person). Try finding out who the real meteorologists are and pay attention to them. I've found that when the national sources are clearly wrong, the local meteorologists will contradict them with their own, local forecasts, which are almost always right.

Answer 5

To illustrate how difficult weather forcasting is, let me quote Robert T. Ryan:

"Imagine a system on a rotating sphere that is 8000 miles wide, consists of different materials, different gasses that have different properties (one of the most important of which, water, exists in different concentrations), heated by a nuclear reactor 93 million miles away. Then, just to make life interesting, this sphere is oriented such that, as it revolves around the nuclear reactor, it is heated differently at different times of the year. Then, someone is asked to watch the mixture of gases, a fluid only 20 miles deep, that covers an area of 250 million square miles, and to predict the state of that fluid at one point on the sphere 2 days from now. This is the problem weather forecasters face."

Answer 6

Because it's a given fact that NOBODY can accurately predict the weather. Some old timers can just look outside and do a better job than forecasters. As for people who always watch weather shows on TV, it's so they'll have something to complain about when the weatherman's wrong, which he usually is. Why not just enjoy nice weather when we have it and do something that's constructive and makes you happy when the weather's bad. And another thing; tell the weather watchers to quit complaining... there's nothing they can do about it. Michael J.

Answer 7

Weather prediction is not an exact science. It represents a best guess based on measured atmospheric data, experience and computer models. Thats why forecasts and given in general terms and probabilities (50% chance of rain).

Answer 8

Nope never held responsible for bad predictions. What situation did you allow yourself to get into where you think miscalculating the weather is a criminal offense? Weird

If you don't like weather forecasters - go outside and judge for yourself. People have been predicting their own weather since the beginning of time.

Answer 9

Meteorologists can attribute their inaccuracy to Chaos Theory.

Because the weather system is so complex, the slightest error in inital data can throw the results (forecasts) off by a lot.

If you think you can do better, by all means, get a BS in Meteorology and try.

Answer 10

No matter how good a weather man is, he/she can't predict Chaos Theory, which ultimately, controls the weather.