Weather weather everywhere

Flood waters are receding here in Florida at my dad's retirement park. A few lots were underwater and some roads were blocked. All in all it wasn't all that bad.

My tablet has one of those weather apps on it. It gives weather alerts in all the location I've been following. Since I've been doing a lot of traveling in the past year the locations range from Maine to Florida to Texas. Yesterday every since reporting station that I'd marked had some sort of weather alert.

The dangers ranged from the serious, hail, lightning and flooding, to the expected: lots of frost warnings up north.

At first it looked pretty bad to see every weather station on alert. However, since over half of them were for minor things like frost warnings, it wasn't all that bad. Cold nights at the end of September in New England are not unexpected. Sure, the warnings are of value if you have plants that need to be covered or water lines drained, but does it rate the same alert status as tornadoes?

That's one of the problems of these full time weather forecasters -everything is a crisis. They blow things all out of proportion. Worse is when they make some horrible predictions and nothing major happens. Then they go on like they never made such predictions. One day it's Armageddon, the next it's business as usual.

The hype was so bad last winter that whole cities were shut down for snowstorms that while significant, were not exactly record breaking. It's like the boy who calls wolf all the time. When something major really is coming, few people take it seriously.

Bad weather can kill people, so it's something to take seriously. However, there has to be nuance to the system. Being on constant high alert is pointless when the “treats” don't warrant it.

-Sixbears