Summer in the City: All Forecasters Predict Major Heat Wave

Start getting ready to hear the heat wave classics on the radio ... according to virtually all weather forecasters in the Twin Cities, a major heat wave is expected to arrive by the end of the week. For Sunday, no forecaster is going lower than 95. At this point, KSTP is most bullish on a persistent heat wave, forecasting a high of 98 next Tuesday. As of Tuesday evening, here's how both the local and national weather outlets saw the steamy forecast (Strib forecast is as of Tuesday morning):

Update: As of Wednesday night, here's how forecasters saw the upcoming heat wave (Saturday through Wednesday). Note that KSTP, as it often seems to be, forecasts the highest temperatures, with an average heat wave temperature of 97.4 for the five-day period.

Future Scan vs. Reality: How Did It Stack Up for KARE11 Sunday Night?

Future scan, or "future radar" as some weather outlets call it, has increased in popularity over the last several years. Yet we've always wondered how future radar verifies. A tweet from KARE11's Sven Sundgaard detailed the future radar for 11:39 (the tweet was issued at 10:40 so the "future" in this case was about one hour). Here is how the future scan appeared (click here for actual depiction):

Here is TMF's screen capture of KARE11 radar's actual scan at 11:40:

Finally, for good measure, here's a radar scan from Wunderground.com at about the same time:

In our opinion, while the future scan reasonably communicated the essence of the storm movement -- and therefore did provide a service, the future scan did not account for the heavier showers that persisted on the north side of the Twin Cities. A big deal? Probably not in this case. But we think that given the inherent unpredictability of summer storms, it can be risky business to provide an image that suggests an all-knowing future.

How would you assess the effectiveness of KARE11's future radar and the concept of future radar in general? Leave your comments below.

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Fox9 Weather App Amiss With Fox9 Website

Fox9 has made a big deal promoting its newly released weather application for mobile phones. While the app has a few nice features (good radar, alerts and ability to mark favorite locations), there is a discrepancy between the application and the weather television presentation.

What seemed most curious is that the forecast temperatures and sky conditions don't match between the app and what's posted on the website (not to mention that both forecasts were a day light in being updated). For example, on Friday evening at 11:45 p.m., here's what displayed on the app and website:

From Fox9 Weather App

From Fox9 website

Note that for Tuesday through Thursday the variance in high temperatures is considerable, with an eight degree difference on Thursday. There are also differences where the weather app icons show rain while the website icons show sun. It's hard for us to take a station's weather app seriously when there is such a difference.

Our guess is that the source for the app's weather forecast is not made by the on-air mets. The app appears to be produced by the WSI Corporation, which produces weather forecasts of its own through places like Intellicast.com. Fox needs to square this issue before it can expect its mobile phone viewers to take the new app seriously.

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A Baseball Geek, A Weather Geek

OK, a little aside that weather geeks might get a kick out of ...

A recent article in Sports Illustrated analyzed a pitch called the cut fastball. Included in the article were funky "heat" graphs that depicted the difficulty hitters are having in hitting the increasingly popular and nasty pitch.

Per the graphic above, any weather geek would quickly conclude that the graphs looked nearly identical to radar images reflecting nasty thunderstorms and hook echoes, right? So what's a baseball fan/weather geek to do? How about write an article to Sports Illustrated? The graphic below reflects that the popular sports magazine does indeed have a sense of humor. (Note the letter that begins at the top of the second column.)

Source: Sports Illustrated, July 4-11, 2011