Meteorologists Apologize for Storm Forecasts

By Alfred Branch (Patch Staff)

Oops, my bad.

As snow and winds pummel New England, some meteorologists are asking for a mulligan for their less-than-accurate predictions for the blizzard of 2015.

In many cases, the forecasts didn’t even start trickling in until Sunday, and they called for as much as two feet of snow throughout the Hudson Valley Monday and Tuesday. The end result was noticeably less.

Gary Szatkowski, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, and others took to to Twitter to offer mea culpas.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed a travel ban Monday night but lifted it early Tuesday morning. “It’s fair to say it was less destructive than predicted so far but there were variances in what the storm actually did,” Cuomo said during a press conference Tuesday.

Philadelphia news anchor Cecily Tynan followed Szatkowski’s lead, as did Dan Skeldon.

In a briefing Tuesday morning, Cuomo defended the state’s actions in advance of the storm. In response to journalists’ questions about the decisions to ban travel overnight and to shut down the MTA, Cuomo said he would rather err on the side of caution.

“I’ve seen the consequences the other way,” he said. “I’d rather say we got lucky than we didn’t get lucky and somebody died.

“We had a storm several weeks ago where I believe the forecast was for a modest amount of snow and we then had seven feet of snow in Buffalo,” he said. “We didn’t close roads because we weren’t expecting that....we had people stranded on roads for 12, 15, 20 hours.”

He said something publicly about inaccurate predictions, and ”I was roundly berated for days for criticizing the weather forecast.”

You live and learn, he said. “Weather forecasters do the best they can and we respond to the best information we have.”

Image via AccuWeather.com

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