Weathermen?!?

I know I am not the first or the last to come to this conclusion, but holy cow, weathermen don't know anything!  If I went to my job and performed adequately roughly fifty percent of the time (and that is probably being generous) I would be fired!  And if for some reason my superiors didn't fire me I would quit on my own.  How can any self confidence be left for someone who is successful fifty percent of the time?

I have come to the conclusion that essentially any idiot can be a weathermen.  Some of these idiots are meteorologists, who apparently have more schooling in the science of weather than a simple forecaster.  I am not sure what is taught in these meteorology classes, but predicting the weather must not be a part of the curriculum.  I bet that meteorologists can do a great job explaining the weather after the fact, as could most scientists.  So instead of being forecaster they should be called storytellers.  Quite frankly, I think I do the same thing most of these professionals do when I want to know what is in store weatherwise, I go to weather.com or a similar site.  I would love to have a job where the only requirements I had was to visit a website and report on what the website says.



Another one of my weather pet peeves is the way the weather is forecasted on these websites.  When looking at the hourly forecast, which in my experience is more accurate than the weather forecaster, there are little pictures to represent what type of weather is going to occur each hour.  The part I find interesting is that the websites will show a little picture of a nasty snow storm, as a teacher this always piques my interest since there is nothing better than getting a phone call saying you can come to work late, or not at all, but when you look closer under the chance of precipitation it says 20%.  How stupid is that?!?  Shouldn't they instead show a picture of the sun or clouds since there is an 80% chance of that type of weather?  Instead, lets forecast snow to cause a panic or in the case of school children and teachers a sense of false hope.