Don’t blame the weather service. The meteorologists who make those forecasts are doing the best they can to solve an immensely complex riddle that is the weather. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. More often than not, it’s right, or at least close enough to right to count. I guarantee you that you wouldn’t have a better track record if you were in their shoes.

Much of how well the forecasts work out depends on where you live. We’ve spent many weeks on sailboats in the tropics, specifically the Caribbean. In the winter in the Caribbean even a monkey could make a pretty good forecast: east winds, 10 to 20 knots, party cloudy with occasional showers and temperatures in the 80s. The steady winds and unvarying temperatures are what make the Caribbean so attractive to sailors.

The farther north you go the less predictable the weather becomes, especially in the winter. The big surges of cold air pouring out a Canada in the winter make forecasting extra difficult. The fronts move fast and conditions in front of and behind the fronts change rapidly.

That’s where we’re lucky here in Florida. Many of the worst cold fronts peter out long before they reach the peninsula and even when they do, the relatively warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the west side of the state and the warm Gulf Stream on the east cost tend to moderate the fronts. Sure, it will still get cold—I’m talking about a brief freeze in north Florida, temperatures dipping into the 30s in central Florida and maybe the low 40s in south Florida. But that sure beats the frosty mornings that afflict our neighbors in Georgia or Alabama and the hard freezes and snow storms further north. The best thing is the cold spells seldom last very long.

But I digress from my original point about not blaming the forecasters. The problem is we’re lulled into thinking weather forecasting is pretty simple because it looks that way when we read the short little forecast in our newspaper or listen to the weather guy on TV tell us what lies ahead. Underlying those brief outlooks, though, is some heavy-duty science. I’ve tried several times to study meteorology on my own, using textbooks or more popular works, and while I’ve made some progress, what I really know at this point is that I don’t know much about meteorology. 

If you want to get a feel for how difficult forecasting is, go to www.wunderground.com and call up your local forecast. At the bottom of the seven-day forecast summary is a little box labeled “Scientific forecaster discussion.” Click on that and you’ll be reading the meteorologist’s attempt to describe and interpret conditions in your area and derive a forecast from those conditions. You won’t have to read many of those summaries to see what kind of complexity the forecaster is dealing with.

The key, of course, is to treat the forecast more as a likelihood of what will happen, not a certainty. The further out the meteorologists forecast, the less certain they are of how the real situation, with the thousands of variables that affect weather, will shape up.