I hope this trend stops soon, but once again we have another severe risk posted for Sunday from the Storm Prediction Center. It basically goes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast. You will see maps being posted all over social media, just like last week, talking about a severe risk 5-7 days in the future. On Sunday March 23rd, we only had 1 severe thunderstorm warning in our area, and it didn't even verify. As a meteorologist, this is becoming extremely frustrating. We don't want people feeling like they are constantly under a risk unless it's truly necessary because then when we want people to listen up and pay attetnion to the weather, they simply won't. You can't blame them!Â
Let's take yesterday as another example of how foolish this practice is. Below is the Storm Prediction Center risk for Saturday from yesterday and today. Yesterday, there was a huge slight risk for Saturday covering parts of 8 states, but targeting Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Today there isn't a risk at all!
Isn't that confusing? This is called unpredictability in the long-range and these data shifts happen constantly. In the past, we have dealt with these severe risks by holding back on issuing them until confidence was high enough. If you follow Marc Weinberg on X, then you will see he even stated "It would have been wise to allow these shifts to work out in the numerical models before issuing that risk. Allow the multi-wave complexity to work out a bit prior to assure the area you warn is appropriate." Quite frankly, these 4-8 day risks were saved for high-end events that appeared fairly likely to unfold. You can't just tell millions of people they could see severe weather on this weekend, and the next day say absolutely nothing will happen. Less than 3 days out the data can still shift around, but at that point we can be far more accurate. Accuracy is our policy here at WDRB. What's the bottom line? Sunday is the day to monitor for our area, but as noted models are still changing a lot run to run. New runs of the American GFS model don't even show the storm until Monday! I strongly urge you to follow a local meteoroligst you trust, and don't get caught up in all the nonsense you will see online.Â
