Imagine somebody aims a gun at you and I say, "Watch out, he's going to shoot you!" Then he fires the gun, but it misses you by an inch. You wouldn't say "you idiot, the bullet didn't hit me at all." But the weather equivalent has people thinking forecasters are stupid.

I theorize if we started smashing them in the balls with a tackhammer every time they're wrong, you'd see both a mass exodus out of that field and a marked increase in accuracy.

Did you forget about the entire city of Philadelphia? 14 inches predicted, < 1 inch actual snowfall.

The city is practically a ghost town today thanks to a botched weather forecast. Tons of businesses and schools closed preemptively because they were predicting massive snowfall totals with what seemed like absolute certainty. According to meteorologists here, it wasn't about whether or not we were getting snow, it was about whether we were getting 1 foot or 2 feet.

OK, but so what? This is about unpredictability, not over-estimation. If the unpredictability was better conveyed the best case scenario is still everyone preparing like they did for a storm that didn't hit. Worst case is suffering hardships due to underestimating the storm.

I'm a bit further northeast and it's coming down pretty hard outside my window right now. The preemptive cancellations really did avoid a lot of unsafe travel here. We have a bit more familiarity with the unpredictability of snowfall predictions, but it usually manifests as people saying: "It won't be that bad" and getting into trouble the few times it really is that bad.

It didn't hit the cities that aren't used to big snowfall. But those cities house a lot of national media, so now we get to listen their scorn for the next week.

There is a very significant economic impact during high-impact weather-related decision making. The city of NY is missing out on a huge amount of money due to the "poor planning" - additionally, so is the rest of the world if flights were cancelled that did not need to be cancelled. Decision making is important in NYC, and providing the best possible information to the decision makers is a critical aspect of modern meteorology.

Maybe you don't care that it missed NYC, but Delta cares. Minimum wage workers who couldn't get to work and missed a shift care. The Mayor cares. etc.

With the right data, you can come to some level of statistically optimized set of decisions, but that won't ever completely eliminate the instances when you turn on emergency actions, but the storm doesn't follow up. It merely minimizes them...

Really, if all these private and public entities care about the accuracy of forecasts, maybe they should have made more noise when NOAA programs were being gutted during the budget process and long term decisions were being made about satellite programs... I can't imagine what the handwringing will be if the satellite coverage gaps come to pass. Maybe we'd actually learn that certain investments in common needs actually pay off quite well.