It’s weather or not
I suppose that there are places where the climate is so uniform, so predictable that nobody cares what tomorrow will bring. Not here. Not in Canada.
Nowadays, we check the digital thermometer before our eyes are fully open, and then turn on the MeteoMedia channel to see what is in store. The Environment Canada site is at the top of the bookmarks, and home pages carry little plugins to bring the changes in temperature to our desktops within minutes of an update.
It wasn’t always so simple. I’m reading a book called “Into The Blue” by Andrea Curtis. Good book, in passing. She takes the time to explain how weather forecasting came into the storyline for a shipwreck on the Great Lakes about a century ago. Now, a century is better than a lifetime for the average among us, but my grandparents were up and about back in 1906, so I’ll claim that it falls within my six degrees of separation.
She mentions how the telegraph offices would post the “probs” each day, and how the great locomotives heading down to the Maritimes would be adorned with a large metal “full moon”, “crescent moon” or “star” to signal the predicted weather to the east for the next few days. I can remember my uncle requesting that I tune in CFCY each day when I was living up east, so he could “catch the probs”. I knew what he meant, but didn’t know the historical context. Look how much smarter I am now, boys and girls.
My own contact with the great environment machine taught me to observe the weather in a scientific, recordable manner. I could code up the obs in less than seven minutes to get them out on the telex, respecting the rules laid down in my copy of Manobs. I was part of a nation, nay worldwide, network that gathered the data necessary for a PDP-11 to prepare the foundations of a prediction.
There you have it. We’re going in to a second week of rain showers, but I have the prediction in hand, and I know that it follows the best scientific principles available. I don’t have to like what we’re in for, but it’s weather or not.
