Put the "W" Right Here

In the spirit of writing at least as often on non-political topics as on political ones, this brief piece is an appeal to the hardest-working types out there, who are seldom as accurate as their title of "forecaster" would lead you to believe, but who continue to tilt at the windmill of accuracy the best their data will allow them.

I refer, of course, to the weather people on the news.

I gladly concede that they try their best every day, and deal with the data given them.  No, in fact this has nothing to do with how good they are at forecasting, and everything to do with the presentation of what they tell us.

As the capabilities of the National Weather Service and the Weather Channel and all the other trackers and compilers of weather data get better, there is a compulsion to share all that with us.  Accordingly, a typical weather segment on the news is likely to have maps on the screen that show us not only the current temperature, but also "wind chill", dew points and even changes-in-temperature-over-time.

But there's one little problem there.  They all look the same!

They have to look the same; they're all measured in the same units, i.e., degrees on the old Fahrenheit scale.  If you look at a weather map with a bunch of numbers on it in different areas, you're going to assume it is showing actual temperature, now or later.  Of course, it could be wind chill, or dew points or delta-temperature; you have to look at the caption to figure that out.  That means you have to find the caption first, of course; it might be on top, it might be on the bottom.  It might not even be there at all. And by the time you look at the caption, the map has changed.

This has annoyed me for a long time, especially in winter, when all I care about is the $%^@$ temperature.  So naturally, I have a solution.

Let's restate the problem: weather maps with numbers measured in degrees all look the same, and are on the screen too briefly to find the caption, interpret it and then go back to our own geographical area to consider what's there.  We can't change the time; we can't really change the metrics.  We can, however, very easily change the presentation.

My proposal is simple.  When a weather map is displaying actual temperature, put up the numbers the same as always, and we slugs in the TV audience will infer that it is showing "current temperature."  When it is displaying anything else, just put a character right after every number on the map, at half the font size, that immediately indicates what it is.

For example -- let's say we're doing a map of wind chill.  Suppose the wind chill is 24 in Washington, 12 in Boston and -7 in Caribou, Maine.  Instead of showing "24", "12" and "-7" and confusing the viewer, put "24w" over the nation's capital, "12w" over Beantown and "-7w" over Caribou.  There would be no need to look for a caption; the viewer will immediately realize those are wind chills and get, pun intended, the drift.


In the same manner, a map full of numbers like "64d" and "70d" and "57d" will instantly be interpreted as showing dew points, as if anyone cared.  If the map is showing, say change in temperature over the last 24 hours, just put an up or down arrow, the same size as the numerals, next to them to indicate both the increase or decrease in temperature and the fact that this is a delta-temperature map!

Check out the map above.  Isn't it immediately obvious that this is something other than a straight temperature map?  Wouldn't you be able to keep your eyes on the map because it is clearly wind chills?  I would certainly think that the Weather Channel might actually want to do something like this.

Just give me a tiny bit of the credit.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton