Word on the street is that a certain amateur meteorology site is starting to tease about a large snowfall event a week or so out. It must be winter again!

I don’t begrudge amateur meteorology sites in general. In the Internet age, there’s a lot that you can teach yourself and plenty of access to raw model data from which to build a forecast. As in most fields, the passionate amateur can be more skillful than the trained professional. Of course, this is generally limited to a specific skill, which is why the better amateur weather sites tend do focus on a particular thing.

Focusing on hyping winter weather events a week or more out is not an area that should be focused on. This is particularly true when the hype is completely unjustified meteorologocially and ends up requiring professional meteorologists in the National Weather Service and local media to spend time telling the public not to believe the “information” that should never have been shared in the first place.

Forecasting the weather is hard. Effectively communicating the uncertainty inherent to that forecast to the public is even harder (and not done nearly enough). Posting an outlier scenario to Facebook is easy. Any site that provides forecasts for public consumption and (somehow) finds a way to get partnerships with legitimate media outlets needs to eschew the easy. Otherwise, it’s simply self-service and not public service.