Career In Meteorology

Why can meteorologists be wrong so consistently and still keep their jobs?

Now I know that meteorology is notoriously inexact, and the accuracy drops very quickly to next to nothing once you look more than a week or so into the future, but our local meteorologist has to be an idiot. I wish I could get paid in the high five figures to be wrong about the weather on a nightly basis. I live in the middle of South Carolina, a relatively warm and snow-less place, most of the time. We had gotten a light dusting earlier this year, and he predicted that, tonight, there would be five to ten inches of accumulation in the upper 25-30% of the state, three to five in the middle area, one to three in the lower middle, and a dusting down closer to Charleston and the coastline. This was at 2 o'clock Sunday afternoon. Every three hours for the next 12 hours, the 'amount of snowfall' graph moved slowly but surely towards the northwest part of the state, till Columbia (basically smack in the middle) was left on the very trailing edge of "coating," which is code for 'not enough to have fun." It is now 2:52 in the morning, it is still raining, and the temperature isn't even bordering on freezing; it's like 36 degrees outside (nothing even REMOTELY close to the predicted sixteen.) So I ask again: Why can meteorologists be wrong so consistently and still keep their jobs?

Public Comments

1. 1. Meteorologists on TV make well over 6 figures. Normal meteorologists that don't work on TV make up around 90k. 2. Weather is too unpredictable, it's very hard to predict even the day before even with advanced technology. It's very common for weather people to be completely wrong about what will happen the next day. 3. Meteorologists pretty much just goes by off what the computer says. It's not their fault when they give wrong information. They don't have much personal decision on what they think is going to happen.
2. There are two ways to look at it: 1. Your forecast was off by 20 degrees in temperature and 100% in snowfall. 2. The storm track estimate was off by 100-200 miles. On a local scale, the forecast was way off, but on a larger scale it wasn't nearly as bad (not good, but not a total strikeout). Unfortunately for you, the snow band was narrow enough that a small miss is all it took. And I know how you feel. I've seen three solid snow forecasts this winter turn to cold rain with a little slush mixed in. It's frustrating, but there isn't enough computer power on earth to accurately model the weather and provide truly accurate forecasts.
3. Ok i'll be very brief... First, it's not the meteorologist that is wrong but the instruments. He analises and explains what instruments give him. Second, it's not the instruments that don't fonction correctly but the climate on Earth that is completely crazy. In the past, we couldn't predict weather due to non precise instrumentation. Nowadays, you can't predict because the weather is very very unstable even though instruments are better than before. So if someone or perhaps something has to be blamed it's the Climate. Be happy that they can still be a bit precise about what's going to happen instead of telling you nothing.