Excuses in Predicting the Future

Yesterday I said if I ran the zoo, yesterday would have been a snow day. I guess a lot of other people had similar thoughts, and so a little after noon, the school district came out with an explanation...

We’ve received inquiries about why a 2-hour delay or snow closure was not called today. Our process calls for announcing a delayed start or closure by 5:30 a.m. At that time, weather reports were still indicating we would receive an inch or two of snow through midday, and temperatures and wind would not be a significant concern. As you know, the storm ended up delivering much more snow in a shorter amount of time than forecasted for our area, making for challenging road conditions.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes our decisions do not play out how we would like. We regret that this unexpected change in weather conditions led to a challenging commute for many families and our bus transportation team. Parents always have the right and the responsibility to do what is best for their children, and our schools respect those decisions. The option to bring children to school late or keep children home when weather conditions are extreme is always at the parents' discretion.

So yeah, at 5:30 in the morning they couldn't have known how bad it would be by looking out the window or by the predicted forecast. 

And about that predicted forecast, the Denver Post posted an article following the botched weather forecast. In part they said,

Mountain forecasting is significantly more complicated than most other places on the planet, and while meteorology overall has made huge strides over the last few decades, the hyper-local nature of forecasting mountain weather is one of the more elusive challenges still befuddling weather forecasters. 

[... A whole lot of technical weather information about winds and slopes, etc...]

Finally, you’re probably aware that weather forecasters use guidance from computer forecast models to simulate how weather events may play out. Almost all of those simulations had an inch or less of snow for the Denver area for Monday. The one computer model that accurately showed a higher forecast event, the European model, showed a 3-to-6 inch scenario for Denver. None of the computer models showed what Denver would end up with. In essence, forecasters were flying blind heading into this particular storm.

So yeah, the meteorologist forecasters were flying blind, the superintendent was doing the best he could with the information he had.  What can you do? We're actually lucky we have the information we do about what the weather will be. Whoever said predicting the future was easy?