I walked outside on Friday morning around 7 AM to pick up my Seattle Times.
What did I find? A totally, sodden mess. A hulk of wet pulp. No plastic bag around it.
The same thing happened a few weeks ago.
The same thing happened several times last year.
Was this a surprise rain event?
No. Totally predictable.
Typically, newspapers are delivered around 4-5 AM. Here is the radar around 3 AM that morning. Heavy precipitation was moving in. One could have known this by using a free weather radar app.
The National Weather Service forecast had predicted the rain on Friday for DAYS (see forecast on Wednesday).
And the UW forecast model was essentially perfect the day before:
It is perhaps ironic that a newspaper that claims, with great authority, the ability to predict the climate decades ahead, can't use basic weather information in its distribution of newspapers.
As I will describe in detail in a future blog, the poor use of highly skillful weather forecasts is a major societal issue.
Not using forecasts properly led to the Maui wildfire disaster, severe wildfire death tolls in California, and most recently, the extraordinary loss of life in western North Carolina with Hurricane Helene.
I look forward to that future post. You're right that willful ignorance of weather forecasts is a problem. Currently I'm trying to remedy that on a small scale with a class project. Last year I tried on a bigger scale with my blog, and although it's my most-read post in the last year, it wasn't much read.
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