Meteorologists said a “historic storm” was barreling for New York City, causing officials to effectively shut down the region. Here’s where they went wrong.
AP Julio Cortez
So what happened? Why did the storm appear to be such a clear danger that officials literally shut the city down, yet the dire forecast failed to materialize?
The National Weather Service predicted 20 to 30 inches of snow in the city. In the end, less than half — 9.8 inches — fell in Central Park.
Tuesday evening, after the forecast failure was apparent, meteorologist Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics, a private weather firm, chatted with BuzzFeed News about what happened. Maue described a series of missteps that ultimately led to the wildly overblown New York City snow predictions.
Unlike a hurricane, the storm materialized very quickly. Maue said that in less than 24 hours it grew from basically nothing to a massive system off the coast of New England. That made the storm difficult to predict and offered few opportunities to adjust predictions, a routine procedure with hurricanes.
"Until the event is actually underway the numbers are hard to nail," Maue said. "It was a very difficult forecast."
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1zwftMJ
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