Hurricane Coverage and Weather Reporting in General Makes Me Mad
Okay, in a world where I can sit down to my computer, click a couple of buttons, and watch every movement of someone’s pet cat during the course of a day, or turn the lights and stereo on and off in someone’s apartment in Japan from my keyboard, I want to know a couple of things.
1) How do meteorologists and news stations in general sleep at night using emergency weather conditions for nothing more than a ratings bump? Do they really believe they are providing up-to-the-minute - on-your-side coverage? What, they can’t get a fifty dollar web cam and point it at the radar scope? Most of the images are only updated a few times a day. You can hear that a storm has changed tracks three or four times and still be seeing the old images on all the “on-your-side” weather sites.
2) Is it somehow helpful to us all to wait four or five hours so that our update can include some not-enough-sense-to-come-in-out-of-a-hurricane weather reporter blowing away in hurricane gust wind - his /her microphone so full of wind you can’t make out a word he / she’s saying and water whipping into his / her face dramatically? How is that in any way helpful? Put up some cameras in positions that actually show pertinent damage, and get out of there, showing us you can not only help predict the weather, but that you respect it and consider it more than something to boost your career.
Sometimes I wonder at the things that lag behind technology. Kids in high school could tell you in a few minutes how to actually make radar available. The air radar images are one thing, but the “super Doppler” radars are not all aircraft based, and their images are available every hour of every day. Those images are video that an even half-assed competent IT team could convert to something usable on a computer screen - or if not, could be presented from a web cam with very little strain or expense, all things considered.
So you out there at VIPIR radar and TEN ON YOUR SIDE and all the local folks, and you at the Weather Channel and all the other places claiming to be “up-to-the-minute” - you aren’t. You aren’t even up to the hour, and you know it. You want respect from THIS viewer, provide useful service and report as if you graduated high-school already - don’t go blowing away in a wind storm with your microphone when all I want is a constant track on the storm, a solid radar picture that didn’t come from four to eight hours ago, and intelligent commentary when it’s time for the news.
-DNW
