Various forms of “cutbacks” and “right-sizing” over the past few years have reduced our ability to get timely and relevant information. This is becoming very evident as we track weather forecasting along the coast and current forecasts available through the mainstream media.
Let’s be clear. Forecasting the weather for “Nova Scotia” is not going to be an easy task. The province is a collection or collage of micro-climates that offer a degree of variability. Just drive from Yarmouth to Sydney over the course of a day and watch the differences.
There are resources that will offer slightly better detail about the current conditions. People that own weather stations have often made them available through groups like Wunderground (see the Resources page) that can offer details on conditions. These may not be as reliable and precise as government owned and operated weather stations, but are we really as concerned about the refined differences when the general forecasts can be out as much as 5C?
Perhaps it is time to look at crowd-sourcing this kind of information bringing that into the mainstream. The folks doing the weather forecasts (our friendly TV weather people) are not out to get us or mislead us. They are working with a certain level of verified data and using models .
So, how about we have a published set of criteria from the weather services that would help guide those people who have weather stations become a source of data for these kinds of services? This might include how high the station needs to be, how far from things that may block the wind, how far away from things that might cast shadows on it, and so on. Then, once the weather station owner has done this and the data is being published, it can be more reliable for those services.
It’s pretty apparent that the larger systems are taking care of their own thing. The loss of the weekend news from one company just goes to show where their interests lie. That being said, we may have options that would make us less reliant on them in the first place.