Weather reporting in Southern California

Now, San Diego has always been known for its ideal climate, one of the main reasons the metropolis is also known as “America’s Finest City.” San Diego is one of the top ten best climates in the Farmer’s Almanac, and one of the two best summer climates in America according to The Weather Channel. Although not quite as temperate, conditions in San Diego’s neighbor to the north, Los Angeles, are not too shabby either. Both cities are characterized by warm, dry summers and mild winters. More than half the days each year are above 70 °F, and the region has low rainfall as well. As a result, the forecasting of weather is less diverse than in cities with more varied conditions, and meteorologists struggle to come up with synonyms for “beautiful,” “glorious,” and “picturesque” to describe a 10-day forecast that reads sunny and 72 °F.

These feelings of inadequacy are already made apparent in the way news stations name their weather segments and tracking mechanisms. Here in San Diego, ABC has Pinpoint Weather Interactive and Pinpoint Doppler Live, while CBS has Microclimate Weather. On its website, NBC has a section that displays 26 interactive maps showing everything from current dewpoint to lightning strikes. Why, might I ask, do we need a permanent map on the NBC weather page for lightning strikes? They occur how many days out of the year? We might not even get a single lightning strike in some years!

That’s why, when a little rain, wind, or fog enters Southern California’s atmosphere, the men and women who report the weather to us each day can scarcely conceal their excitement, and the coverage of the rainfall, wind speeds, and fog density is just a tad bit overstated.

 
And by “just a tad bit overstated,” I mean “completely and utterly out of control.” Where else in the country does a storm expected to drop up to three-quarters of an inch of rain in some (read, not all) areas over the course of a week receive a special title or designation? Well, in Southern California, “Storm Watch [insert year]” galvanizes the headlines as eager reporters use words like “torrential downpour,” “heavy showers,” and “violent precipitation” to describe a couple hours’ worth of drizzle and cloudy skies.
 
Also, because weather anchors in SoCal have such little to talk about, at times they even resort to taking events that are not weather and calling them weather. Dagmar Midcap (weirdest name ever) can be seen on a commercial in San Diego saying that she enjoys keeping San Diegans up to date on the weather that matters to them, including fires and earthquakes. Um, last time I checked, Dagmar, neither fires nor earthquakes were counted among Earth’s weather phemonema. While wildfires may occur as a result of hot, dry, and windy weather conditions, this does not mean the fire itself is “weather.” Earthquakes are seismic event caused by rupture of geological faults, volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts, and nuclear tests. Both are certainly natural disasters, but neither are themselves weather. And Dagmar, a paid weather reporter for one of the top three networks in San Diego, should not be captured in a frequently replayed advertisement promoting herself saying that they are.
 
Of course, I say all of this at the beginning of 2012, the year in which the world ends according to the Mayan calendar. Which means I might be paying just slightly more attention to STORM WATCH 2012 as we approach December 21^st than I otherwise would.