Last July, we wrote about "
A Case of Nowcasting Gone Terribly Wrong," in which we wrote about Jonathan Yuhas's efforts to provide a nowcast, essentially a very short-term forecast, for how the weather might or might not affect a Twins game and a U2 concert. We wanted to believe his incorrect forecast was a one-time thing, a combination of bad luck and poor judgement. Now, however, we're not so sure.
At 4:03 p.m. on Monday, he tweeted this:
We looked at the radar at the time of the tweet, and this is what it showed (the radar crosshair is pegged at Lakeville):
At the time, it struck us as odd that the tiny, isolated cell (in yellow, about a county to a county and a half just east of due south of Lakeville) could be expected to hold together and land on Lakeville by 5 p.m.
Moments later, we expressed our thoughts to @JonathanYuhas:
Jonathan did not respond to our inquiry.
Fast forward to 5 p.m., and this was the Lakeville-centered radar depiction:
As the radar shows, there were no showers or thunderstorms anywhere remotely close to Lakeville. The t-storm near Owatonna, small as it was, had completely dissipated.
We understand the value of short-term forecasting and warning people about precipitation, but it's our feeling that the science is not yet to the point where such precise forecasts can be made. We think weather consumers are better served by the more general precipitation "nowcast" tweets that many other local meteorologists were tweeting at about the same time.
