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What a flock

The illustrious team of professional weather guessers at KCRG-TV 9 have unveiled their latest attempt at making excuses for why they can't seem to freaking get it right, for cripes sake.

Last night, on the 10 p.m. newscast, Little Joshie Thunderpants (or whoever...I think, they're really all equally, interchangeably incompetent) revealed to viewers a radar view of the entire state of Iowa. He pointed out the series of green patches in the western half of the state that one would assume signaled rain showers in the vicinity (because after all, that IS the point of these gizmos, right).

That's when his dastardly plan came into play. You'd think that was rain, he noted. But, aha! That's where you'd be wrong.

He then claimed that those blobs were actually the wind turbines from wind(mill) farms in western Iowa reflecting or refracting or emitting or whatever it is they supposedly do to show up on a Doppler radar.

So next time the green blobs show up, they might be storms. Or not.

My husband was once watching a weathercast in mid-Missouri when a forecaster insisted that his newfangled radar was so incredibly accurate and sensitive, it could detect a flock of birds flying nearby. The guy offered no chance of precipitation. We woke up the next morning to a rather startling snowstorm.

There was another time the weatherpeople were intently explaining the phenomenon of the "invisible precipitation" which shows up on the radar, but magically disappears before it hits the ground. I wish I could figure out how to harness that power for use with some "invisible credit card payments."

Just to be clear: These radars and their operators can find the birds. They can find the windmills. But can they do what they get paid to do, which ostensibly has something to do with jet streams and barometric pressure? I'd not exactly be going out on a limb (which I'm sure could be detected by sky-warn-four-accuweather-eagle-eye-satellite-radar) in guessing that they cannot. Try Googling "weather forecasters suck" sometime. Happy reading. It's nice to know I'm not making up this stuff in my head.

Even though they are.

And I leave you with this anonymous bit of haha from the 'Net:

So much for that forecast. I just finished shoveling four inches of "Partly Cloudy" off my sidewalks.

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