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Snow forecasting gone awry

Despite grim predictions, Durango gets just a few inches
A man shovels a few inches of snow, far less than forecasters had predicted, in downtown Durango on Sunday.

Over the weekend, Durango was supposed to get inundated by snow.

On Friday, forecasters with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction warned of an impending storm that would bury Durango in up to 2 feet of frosty ice crystals over the course of two days.

Yet the promised mini-blizzard never came.

Dan Cuevas, a technician with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, said, in the end, Durango had received between 3-6 inches of snow by 8 a.m. Monday.

Whether playing the stock market or writing newspaper headlines on deadline, predicting the future can be a dangerous game.

Weather service forecaster Tom Renwick said the forecasters’ mistake wasn’t on the same level as “Dewey Defeats Truman,” the infamous – and incorrect – 1948 headline that ran on the front page of The Chicago Tribune the day after incumbent President Harry Truman won re-election over Republican challenger Thomas Dewey.

“With weather, there’s always a chance that you’ll be wrong. But you can be right 99 times and wrong once, and people will remember the time that you’re wrong!” he said, laughing.

According to Renwick, late last week, all of the many sophisticated mathematical models that the forecasters rely on to predict weather agreed that a storm was headed toward Durango, where the models predicted frigid temperatures through the weekend.

He said, in the end, Durango was warmer than forecasters anticipated, and “the area of low pressure was much further out to the west than the models anticipated.”

The National Weather Service in Grand Junction uses “tons of models,” including the North American Model, the European Model, the Canadian Model and the Global Model, Renwick said.

The weather models, he noted, usually quibble about what’s going to befall a specific town in the near future – disagreeing only about a few degrees here or about few miles there.

What was strange, he said, was every model predicted the wrong thing for Durango this weekend.

The models, he added, had likewise underestimated the thaw in Grand Junction, where forecasters had expected the temperature to be 43 degrees Monday, but it actually turned out to be a much more pleasant 60 degrees.

Butch Knowlton, La Plata County emergency management director, said regardless of whether the storm materialized, county road crews were prepared.

He didn’t blame the forecasters for imperfect prognosticating.

“I’m not going to accuse those guys of getting it wrong,” he said. “I work very closely with them. It’s hard to predict the weather in this corner of the state. I think conditions came into play, obviously, that didn’t work with their forecast. That’s what happens, and I think that’s what happened in this particular case.”

His major takeaway from the region’s recent weather, he said, was that Durango had finally received some much-needed precipitation.

In terms of mistaken weather predictions across history, this weekend’s blip was minor.

Renwick recalled when forecasters poo-pooed the likelihood of a 1900 hurricane hitting Galveston, Texas.

“They downplayed everything – then the hurricane hit and killed between 6,000 and 12,000,” he said.

In a gesture of apparent generosity to his 1900 predecessors, Renwick added that weather prediction “was much more difficult before satellites. You just couldn’t see what was going on.”

He pointed to forecasters’ recent success predicting Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina – predictions so exact and accurate, they let people prepare ahead of the storms’ landfalls and almost certainly helped save lives.

“We did a pretty good job with them, if I do say so myself,” he said.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com

Mar 2, 2015
Red Mountain Pass closed


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