Killington Peak, Saturday March 13, 2010 at approximately 1:00PM

Killington Peak, Saturday March 13, 2010 at approximately 1:00PM

Several of us were talking at the bar about the weather last night. The few inn guests that had not cancelled for the weekend were telling me that they had a great day on the mountain on Saturday. They had been dreading coming to Killington because the Weather Channel was hysterically bloviating on a great deluge descending on the North East this weekend. Yet there they sat, having a beverage, reveling in there accomplishments of having a great day on the mountain.

How could the Weather Channel have been so wrong? They had predicted rain for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. They then changed the local Sunday forecast to snow.

The actual weather, as you can see from my last blog posts was warm with overcast on Thursday, low clouds on Friday, high clouds on Saturday (see todays picture). Today, Sunday, we are having a wet mix of light precipitation falling off and on. If you give the Weather Channel today, they are batting 25% for the last 4 days in predicting weather at Killington. And that is being generous.

How did things get this way? Why was the forecast so wrong?

Actually, the forecast by the Weather Channel was not technically wrong. They were predicting a deluge this weekend in the North East. Our friends who stayed home this weekend in Southern New England and the Upper Middle Atlantic states seem to be having a deluge of sorts. And there locations certainly qualify as "North East". Unfortunately, in our hyper media driven 21st century existence, where "information" is constantly no more than one click away, the term "North East" takes on a global specificity like the area is one big flat plain. However, nothing could be actually further from the truth as the true "North East" is riddled with hills, valleys, and mountain peaks. Each one, of course, creates its own micro climate, and also impacts the macro climate at large. The one size fits all forecast derived by the Weather Channel could not possibly cope with all the local variability. Hence they don't even try.

One must remember, the Weather Channel is a commercial venture whose goal is to drive the public to purchase the goods and services of their sponsors. The more fantastic the forecast, the longer people watch and the more eyeballs see advertisements. In the process, they provide some level of public service, ie predicting the weather. And when applied to a regional and national scale, they probably get the trends more right than wrong. But regional trends do not translate into accurate local forecasts with the regularity one would assume if all you did was watch the television or click on a web site. Some times you actually have to go outdoors and take a look!

Ski Resorts have attempted to fight the tyranny of the regional "Weather Forecast" by installing web cams on their respective web sites. (The Killington resort is so big, it has 3. And the weather can be different at each one!) The theory is that if you can take a "look outside" you can make your own judgements. The web cams work well, but in the opposite. If they show a heavy snow storm on Wednesday or Thursday, then people will flock to the mountain on the weekend. But if they show nice weather on a weekend...by then it's a little late.

The ski season at Killington has now started the long march into spring. For skiers and riders, there are but a hand full of weekends left before it will be time to put the boards away for next season. With the weather, some times you win, sometimes you lose. But for the guests who traveled to Killington and enjoyed the mountain this weekend, if they did not play the game, they would have been sitting home in the rain.

......let it snow!