Complaining About The Weather Anchor
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People love to call out the TV Weather Anchor for a blown forecast or to bitch and complain about something else.
Boston.com reached out to the city’s TV Weather folks to see what the most common complaints are and why people might need to take a breath before sending that mean email.
“I can be on at 6 p.m. and forecasting 6 to 12 inches of snow. Then I might be on at 11 p.m., and it looks like this will track just a bit farther south, so I lower the estimates to 4 to 8. Then the next day, we get 5 inches of snow, but a lot of people didn’t see the 11 p.m. news, and the criticism is being based on that forecast, not the updated forecast. That’s why we’re on the air with all of those newscasts; things change.” — Harvey Leonard, Chief Meteorologist, WCVB-TV Channel 5
“One of the other things that I’ve noticed is that people will dip in for a forecast two days out. Look, we all lead busy lives, so I get that people can find it hard to keep checking in to find out if things have changed. But if you get your forecast two days out, and formulate your plans and your thoughts about what’s going to happen, the weather is dynamic enough that it’s important to check back in for updates. We often hear from people who get caught by surprise when something has changed, even 48 hours out from the storm.” — Matt Noyes, Chief Meteorologist, NBC10 Boston and NECN
“Here’s one of the biggest challenges right now: We’re really good at looking at a pattern up to 10, 14 days out. And we know what’s coming down the line for a couple of weeks. ‘This is a cold pattern. This is a stormy pattern. This is a warm pattern.’ But the fine details of a snowstorm that people depend on to make plans are still not very clear until two or three days out, at the most. So that puts us in a frustrating spot, where we have to talk about something a week in advance, because it’s out there, but we can’t really give actionable information until the last couple of days.” — Eric Fisher, Chief Meteorologist, WBZ-TV
“Credibility is our lifeblood. For meteorologists, credibility is everything. If you jeopardize your credibility, you’ve eroded the trust folks have in you. One thing I ask viewers is to really listen to what we’re saying. A televised weather forecast can have whatever bright colors, or graphics, or dramatic music, or crazy animation, or fast-paced presentation that a station puts with it. At the end of the day, the most important part is what the meteorologist is actually saying.” — Noyes
