Alabama/Atlanta Snowpocalypse: When meteorology goes terribly wrong

Six pages before somebody started trolling it. Not bad. I was expecting the idiots to get in the mix early.

 

Easy for you to cry instead of professionally explaining the disparity in the coverage.
Examining the reporting would be compliant with the objective of this site.
That spill is serious shit.

 

If one school district is releasing students at noon, I doubt if a lot of parents would until 1 or 2 in a staggered release.

Also, did the city order businesses to close early or did the businesses make that decision themselves? If the latter, how are they supposed to coordinate that?

 

The weather event was in Atlanta, the home of CNN, making it a local and national story at the same time.

I'm sure lots of CNNers, or at least member of their families, got caught in the mess.

 

That's my thought. Businesses and government never should have opened, for starters. And individuals probably should have passed on it.

I understand that lots of places up north get more snow than that. Maybe some are prepared to handle it. I've driven on snow and ice plenty and never had an accident on it (I usually go quite slowly). But I also wouldn't hesitate to call in and say "sorry, chief, I won't be there today". Heaven knows, I've ditched over far less (and, other times, gone out in far more).

I do feel sorry for individuals who made an honest "maybe it won't be so bad over here" mistake and paid a high price. Hope they survived safely and will learn from the experience moving forward.

 

"Weather event." Pardon me if I smirk.
Yes, I recall the same when the biblical tornado ripped through there during the SEC Tournament.
Americans were laughing at Atlanta today.
Don't take that out on Fart.

 

So, to recap:

A) Since we weren't there, those yahoos are idiots.
2) Also, had we been there, we'd have been home in 20 minutes.

III) What, you can't drive your car on ice? Just drive on the ice! Just do it! NOW, DAMMIT!!

 

Had to take my fiancé to work yesterday since her car is in the shop. Her office is on a hillside, with huge shade trees hanging over the road leading in.

Going in, there was ice covering the road just before the turn into the driveway at her building. No problem.

But coming out, I had to stop to let someone turn in before making a left down the hill. I have an SUV with good tires, and I was going 5 mph tops.

Yet I still slid sideways and bumped the opposite side curb. Took me two or three tries to gain enough traction to get back down the hill.

And this was in Mobile on the third day of the ice storm, when temperatures had already risen back above freezing. Had I been in bumper to bumper traffic on the interstate on Tuesday afternoon like those poor bastards in Atlanta and Birmingham, I'd have been up shit creek.

 

Also, for the "you can predict within an hour when this will happen," it was supposed to start around 4. When it started before noon, that threw everything off.

 

OK. I was wondering how true that might be for southern meteorologists forecasting a rare event. They can do it up here fairly well, but really it takes watching live radar maps "on the day of" the event.

 

The timing of when a storm will hit seems much easier to predict than the location. As much as we'd all like to thing meteorology is gospel, the fact is it's an inexact science.

 

Exactly. Basically everyone in Philadelphia missed the 8+ inches of snow that turned the Eagles-Lions game into a snow game. We were being told we'd get 1-3 inches that day.