So the blizzard that was supposed to bury us alive mostly buried Massachusetts instead, and I spent two days glued to a weather radar app like it was going to personally apologize to me. Which, in a roundabout way, it kind of did.
Quick recap for anyone reading this from somewhere that isn't the Northeast: starting Monday night the entire NYC media apparatus lost its collective mind over Winter Storm Juno. Every forecast had us getting 20 to 30 inches. The mayor's office and the governor issued a full travel ban. The MTA shut down the entire subway system at 11pm Monday — first time in its history they've done that purely because of a forecast, not because snow was actually falling yet. I remember getting the alert on my phone around 9pm and just sitting there like, huh, okay, guess we're doing this now.
I did the thing everyone does before a storm like that, which is go to the grocery store and stand in front of an empty bread aisle feeling vaguely stupid. My local Key Food had nothing left but the fancy seeded rye nobody wants and about four cans of chickpeas. I don't even know what the chickpeas were for. Nobody was making hummus during a blizzard. I bought them anyway out of some deep lizard-brain panic response and they're sitting in my cabinet right now, a monument to crowd psychology.
Here's the part that's actually interesting to me though, and the reason I'm writing this instead of just complaining about chickpeas for 800 words. I've been using Dark Sky on my phone for a while now — it's the one that does the minute-by-minute hyperlocal precipitation thing, tells you "rain starting in 11 minutes" instead of giving you a percentage for the whole day. And starting Monday afternoon, before any of the big models had really walked anything back, Dark Sky's short-term view for my zip code kept showing totals way under what NY1 and the Weather Channel graphics were putting up. I kept refreshing it like it might change its mind and agree with everyone else. It didn't.
By Tuesday morning we'd gotten something like 9.8 inches in Central Park. Not nothing! Still a real snow day, still pretty when I walked out to get coffee. But not the apocalypse the travel ban implied. Meanwhile Worcester got over 30 inches and parts of eastern Long Island and Massachusetts got absolutely flattened, so it's not like the storm was fake, it just landed somewhere else. The forecast models had it maybe 75 miles off, which sounds small until you realize that's the difference between "historic disaster" and "meh, decent snow day."
What got me was watching a National Weather Service meteorologist out of the Mount Holly, NJ office actually go on Twitter and apologize for the miss in his forecast area. I don't think I've ever seen anyone in a public forecasting role just own it like that, no hedging, no "well actually technically." Just: this bust was on us, sorry. I respected it a lot more than the local news anchors who spent Tuesday morning acting like 9 inches of snow was still basically the plot of The Day After Tomorrow.
Anyway. My actual point, if I have one, is that the app on my phone that does small unglamorous localized math beat out an entire cable news forecasting apparatus with helicopters and Doppler trucks and guys in parkas standing on the boardwalk for effect. That's not a knock on meteorology, which is genuinely hard and I don't envy anyone trying to model a coastal storm track three days out. It's more that I've started trusting the boring quiet tool over the loud confident one, and this week is exactly why.
I did not go outside on Tuesday until about 1pm because the subway was still catching up and honestly I just didn't feel like it. Worked from the kitchen table instead with a cup of coffee going cold next to the laptop, which is basically my entire personality some weeks. The chickpeas are still in the cabinet. I'll probably make something with them eventually out of guilt.