Forecaster Failure

Have our forecasters failed us?

We have just had Tropical Storm Watches posted for Cape Cod, the South Coast and the South Shore. It's Monday morning. Jose is coming Tuesday and Wednesday.

This isn't Harvey or Katrina. This storm isn't going to level your town, pour 50 inches of rain on us, smash a poodle's face with a brick or rip out your heart and show it to you. It should be like a big nor'easter, with a limited reach inland.

The forecasters did a crack job of calling it, for a while. While a loopty-loop isn't unheard of, it is impressive to call it and hit it. Then, the storm moved north.

If you listened to Boston weather forecasters, you would have believed that the storm was curving harmlessly out to sea. WBZ had a "No Way Jose" entry up at the top of their weather blog half the week, forecasting a damage-free drang nach osten for the storm that is instead about to impact us.

It could still miss us entirely, but that's beyond the point at the moment.

I recall them (and others) even chiding people for pointing at spaghetti plots and saying "A dangerous storm has a small chance of hitting us." The pros were contemptuous. "Those aren't forecasts, they are possible forecasts," they told us. "Don't believe that junk on the internet. I guarantee that there will be no Tropical Storm Watch."

Whoops!

I don't want to hold the Big L up at them or anything. I'd be a hypocrite. I stated more than once that I believed that this storm would turn out to sea, although I did get started in media as a sportswriter.

We used to bet on landfalls when I wrote for Cape Cod TODAY, and I would always bet on the sudden hook to the east at the last moment. It's the safe bet on Cape Cod, not quite akin to "the sun will set this evening," but still an in-the-black bet over the years.

"We know that too, Stacey," states Barry Burbank. "That's why we forecast them to go out to sea."

"It's impossible to predict what a hurricane will do five days out with our present technology," says Pamela Gardener.

Shiri Spear pipes in with "The National Hurricane Center said the same thing that we said, and they do nothing BUT study hurricanes. They also correctly called a loop, no mean feat."

"Tropical system forecasts have a 150 mile chance of error every day out," points out Bri Eggers.

Here comes Kevin Lemanowicz. "If we got jumpy about every tropical wave that formed in the Atlantic, we'd be in a non-stop panic from June to November."

"If we treated Spaghetti as accurate forecasts, we'd be predicting landfalls concurrently from Miami to Maine for the same storm," notes Eric Fisher.

"And people would tune us out, thus missing a forecast where we someday correctly call dangerous weather conditions," adds Cindy Fitzgibbons.

"Even God blows a weather forecast now and then," says Dick Albert (who might be dead, but I can't think of another local weatherhead name). "It's the nature of the beast."

I would agree with each of them.

I'd also respond with "A tropical storm was coming at us. You said it would curve out to sea well before New England. Instead, it is about to impact us."

Where did we fail?

TV weather forecasting is a touchy business, especially in Boston. We have 4 major channels, plus other weather sources on NECN and TWC. Each one runs the weather at about the same time. Each channel has a girl that a man could stare at reading the weather each morning, and each channel trots out their most believable weatherhead for the 6 O:Clock.

If you fail to get the ratings, you'll be dumped faster than a last-minute prom date. From there, you fall into the smaller markets, eventually broadcasting from a minor Idaho market where you stand in front of a blackboard with Idaho drawn in chalk, and you have a little sock puppet for storms that you have to hop across the screen yourself if there's a chance of rain. "Here comes Mister Thunderstorm!" says a newly relocated Shiri Spear in a falsetto voice, crouching so as not to appear on camera with the sock on her arm as she opens the puppet's "mouth" in a manner suggesting that it is about to devour Boise. That's a far cry from six figures in glamorous Boston, wearing $500 dresses every morning.

Those are the stakes.

With that in mind, you can understand how a weatherman would want to make to safe choice. If you believe that a storm is going to curve out to sea, if history tells you that storms always do that around here and if the NHC backs your play, there is nothing wrong with saying that the storm is going to be harmless.

Unless it isn't.

I see two solutions to this.

The first one involves a basic change to forecasting styles. We need to be warned if there is even a slight chance of a storm hitting us. I think it should be done so as to not incite unnecessary worry, but it should be done. "Some of the spaghetti has the storm hitting in our area, but that equates to about a .0001% chance at the moment." They can then worry more if the tracks merit it.

This involves retraining the public as well as the forecaster. Ideally, you want someone who can look at a spaghetti plot with a strand or two hitting Boston and just become aware of it. No panic, just a little mental notice to watch this storm as it progresses.

Whenever we post spaghetti plots on this site, I get grief from people who think that we are trying to cause a panic. I respond that the true panic is when a storm catches people off-guard.

We could instead have a well-informed and never-scared public, getting their info from weather experts who now have the license to free-lance a bit with the long-range forecast. If a hurricane sneaks up on you then, you only have yourself to blame.

The other solution is more fun, and I may do it myself if I think that money can be made consistently from it. We should rank our weathermen.

There should be a site somewhere that keeps track of what the local weather people forecast, and score it based on how the day works out. There should be a special category for events like hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, deep freezes and blizzards. How far off these events are called would factor into the score.

The scores would be based on a Boston forecast. However, just to keep them on their toes and to avoid a Ripton-like event of suburban/rural ignorance, I'd have the site throw a small town name up every morning for the weathermen to make a detailed call for.

In return, we'd name an MVP every year. The MVP would be the best forecaster in Boston.

I'd like to be involved, but I'd want the face of the company to be an ex-weatherman (or woman... I only say "weatherman" because it generally has a better cadence with whatever I'm writing), someone who got canned for being goofy or ugly or or fat or who worked with a bad anchorman and who has a serious axe to grind with the industry in general. I'd like to do nothing other than feed this bitter MFer jokes.

For weather, it would work like a charm. We'd have to be detailed, and we'd have to be fair. We'd be the only people on Earth doing what we're doing, and we'd have a model that could  be expanded into any market with more than one TV station.

This would both harm and help the local forecasters. The harm would come because someone would have to be at the bottom of the rankings, even if the difference between them and the MVP was "He said six inches of snow and we instead got nine."

The converse works, as well. "I was a three time MVP in the only town where someone ranks weathermen" is a nice to thing to have on your resume if you're applying to work for Good Morning America or to host Chronicle.

They'd also be better weathermen if a Sword Of Damocles were hanging over their heads. They'd work harder, that's for sure. They'd be stronger in a regional manner, because they'd never know which small town we'd be calling until 4 AM or so.

I think that it would also create a supervisor job for another forecaster, especially one with immense local knowledge who is a bit long in the tooth to be in front of the camera. If there's a chance that a site using real data will name you as the least accurate forecast in Boston, you're going to want your game to be airtight.

Either way, the present situation needs to change.

A storm has snuck up on us, in 2017 AD.

Our best minds with the best equipment told us it was harmless, right until it wasn't.

I doubt that anyone will be held accountable.

The public will forget soon enough.

The mistake will happen again.

It shouldn't happen again.

We need to fix the system.

Cape Cod/Highland Light

We headed out to The Highland Light in Truro to see what was what with the former Cape Cod Light.

If you like historic lighthouses, this is your winner. George Washington himself authorized it. It went up in 1797, was rebuilt in 1857 and is still putting in work today. Not too shabby for 17,000 of those 1857 dollars.

Not only did they have to rebuild it, they had to move it inland, away from the eroding sand cliffs that make up Cape Cod's eastern coastline. In 1996, they moved it inland 450 feet... which is about that far (see photo above).

Not only is it Cape Cod's oldest lighthouse, it is the tallest. It is 66 feet tall, or about 10.5 Paul Pierces.

Nothing accents Cape Cod's oldest lighthouse more than a Doppler radar ball. If Godzilla ever takes up golf, that is what it will look like before he tees off. To keep it golfy, the inland move of the lighthouse put it within driving range of the golf course. When someone broke the window of the lighthouse with an errant tee shot, the windows were replaced with unbreakable glass... just like George Washington told them to do back in 1797.

It's impossible to take a bad pic of Highland Light, and I would know, trust me...

I do some creepy shots now and then, but only if I catch someone painting.

... or shooting.

Thug Life!

I only tried that shot 200 or so times. 

Cape Cod's Silly Season

"Silly Season" means different things to different people. Most Englishmen and many Americans use it in media to describe slow summer news seasons where frivolous stories come out. The English also call it "Cucumber Season," which is why we always prevail against England when we fight them.

It is also used in the world of sports, especially in NASCAR, to describe a period outside of the traditional season. That's where we're heading today, we're just talking about a regional economy instead of Dale Junior.

Fans of the film  Jaws will recall Mayor Vaughn attempting to talk some "sense" into Hooper and Brody at various times in the movie. "Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars." Without those summer dollars, people in Amity would, as Quint so graciously put it, "be on the welfare all winter."

They are describing Cape Cod to a T in that movie. Cape Cod is very far from any cities or airports or- amazingly- large commercial harbors that stimulate revenue. We have some businesses, but it doesn't make sense logistically to base a national business here. From November to April, we're not far from how PJ O'Rourke described the collapsing Soviet Union's economy... "Everyone selling coffee and cigarettes back and forth to each other."

"15% of our sales are to California, another 25% goes to Asia... let's put the factory as far away from those people as possible!" is a conversation that only happens in movies where evil rich people are shutting down a factory in a poor town for tax breaks." It is also the only conversation that would put a big industrial plant on Cape Cod.

God saw this coming, and saw fit to bless us with amazing beaches, yummy seafood, gorgeous seas and all sorts of stuff that the factory worker in Ohio doesn't have access to and will pay excessively for the chance to experience. It's symbiotic, if I spelled that right... we send a bunch of money to Michigan for cars, and we get a bunch of it back when someone with vacation time says "Stay home in Detroit, or go to Cape Cod for the summer?"

Typically, Cape Cod's tourist season runs through July and August. These are the months when summer weather demands beach activity in America, and Cape Cod offers that without the sugarcane-harvesting oppressive heat/humidity that you get down in the American South. You can stroll through a much emptier Disney World in August than you can during February vacation, almost entirely because of Florida's well known Komodo Dragonesque climate.

July and August are also when the kids are out of school (unless they f*cked up badly, of course), and can be taken along on a vacation. As nice as leaving the kids home sounds, it is better to keep them where you can see them.

"I'm renting us this cottage on a gorgeous beach with boys/girls everywhere and all sorts of exotic beach stuff to do" is a better option to run past the teenager than "We're going to cram the famn damily in the car and go see the Grand Canyon or Colonial Williamsburg." 

If Chevy Chase had just taken the Griswolds to Cape Cod, he'd have had a much less stressful vacation and we'd be down one or two good Family Road Trip movies. Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday The 13th, Godzilla, The Shining, Twister, The Birds, Night Of The Living Dead, Dracula, The Blair Witch Project, Titanic, Halloween, The Godfather, High Plains Drifter, An American Werewolf In London and hundreds of other violent/disaster movies are peopled with unfortunate folks who chose somewhere other than Cape Cod to spend some vacation time.

So, Cape Cod fattens on Tourist  during these summer months. A perfect storm of weather, school vacations, factory slowdowns and everything else that sends people to us dries up with the warm weather. It's a slow process, but it isn't like flicking a switch or anything, even with most schools in America starting up at about the same time.

I have worked a few years at a Cape Cod hotel, and one thing we all notice is that, after Labor Day, the average age of our tenants goes to AARP levels very quickly. There's a reason for this.

If you see things like Intelligence and Wisdom through Dungeons and Dragons prisms as I do, you'll understand that the I and the W are two different animals. A child could have great natural intelligence, and the only thing holding it back from perhaps running a business is the wisdom one gets as they trod through this world of ours.

If you get 100 kids, 100 adults and 100 senior citizens together, you'll probably get the same amount of intelligent people in each group. However, the older groups will have greater wisdom via their life experiences. Your toddler may assemble Legos twice as fast as mine, but he doesn't know that OJ Simpson may have killed a few people, where even a moron of a 50 year old knows this.

Old People look at September, think of Cape Cod... and that wisdom kicks in. They immediately (and perhaps subconsciously in some cases) start working a checklist:

- The weather is perfect. September is a gorgeous month. September is mostly highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s. You get 80s and you even get 40s, but 75/55 is a typical high/low temperature. You get beach weather during the day, and cool, easy-sleepin' nights. The ocean off of Cape Cod is at peak warmth, and we aren't into the October rainy season. Nor'easters are rare in September, and Cape Cod doesn't get full-time hurricane action.

- The children are back in school. This changes the whole nature of the Cape, and the whole nature of the average tourist. Not only are the kids gone, the parents of the kids are gone.

- Beaches are yours for the taking. No kids and no parents erases a huge demographic from the beach population. I grew up on Duxbury Beach, and it wouldn't be unusual to see 3500 people on Duxbury Beach during Labor Day weekend... and then, three days later and with no appreciable change in the weather, Duxbury Beach might have a dozen people on it. Some days, each person on the beach could have had their own Mile of empty sand.

- That legendary Cape Cod traffic eases mightily. Cape Cod's winter population is about 200,000. It doubles in the summer. Take half of the cars from the road, and note that the remainder are locals who know the side roads and the wrong times to try the bridges... that's why they never build another bridge over the Canal, babe. There's no need for it 9 months of the year.

- Restaurants are less crowded. This means faster seating, less harried service, faster food-to-the-table times, and chefs viewing each plate as a work of art rather than just slopping stuff on a plate. Fly-by-night summer businesses close, and any restaurant in business after Labor Day has to be good enough that locals haven't word-o-mouthed it into shutdown.

- Stores are heavily discounting their goods. Cape Cod has a heavy Snowbird (summer on the Cape, winter in Florida) population, and many busineses will barter heavily with you just to get rid of as much inventory as they can before they head south.

- The attractions that are closed were ones you had no interest in anyhow. Grandma may be really cool and say "Let's spend a day at Water Wizz," but a pair of elderly tourists have had 145 combined years to get their fill of that sort of thing, and couldn't care less if Cape Cod Inflatable Park closes or not.

- The attractions that Autumn offers are very elderly-friendly. September is well described here. October brings in fall foliage, cranberry harvests and all that farm stuff. November even gives a surge, as Plymouth fills up during Thanksgiving and spillover follows. "There's only so much to do in Plymouth, and we've always wanted to see Cape Cod, dear..."

When true winter hits, Cape Cod can get sort of desolate. Few travel agents pitch it. A beach is a rough place to be in the winter, it's always windy and the wind is always in your face. "Look! The beach has snow on it!" wears out in five minutes. Many vacation-friendly businesses are closed. We have the kind of climate where, when we get snow, we get a lot of it.

That scenario is also a few months away, and the old people know that. This leads to Cape Cod getting a Silly Season of elderly-driven tourism during September and through Columbus Day. Cape Cod businesses adapt to this, making it so that a non-grey tourist will find stuff to do if they opt for a day trip.

The September/October period bookends the June/July/August peak season with a corresponding April/May period, but Spring can be sort of funny on Cape Cod. We get an extra month or so of Summer, but we pay for it with chilly Springs. It is not unusual to see a May weather broadcast say "Highs near 70 in Boston, 50s on the Cape."

That also is something that we don't have to worry about at the moment. Instead, Cape Cod is shifting into her Silly Season, fattening before the cold winter.

Mostly, old people use their hard-earned knowledge to dominate the tourist trade here in September... but now, after reading this article, you have the wisdom that some blue-hairs took 60 years to gain. Get down here and spend those dollars!

Harboring: Chatham

The summer-long mission of the Harboring series is to visit every SE Massachusetts port that we can. Today, we went to Chatham.

Chatham is Shark City, but that's no problemo if you're shooting from shore or off a dock.

I'm after prey, just like the shark. I just prey on boats and harbors and scenery.

The sign says nothing about eating mussels or taking pictures.

We're mostly here to scope boats, anyhow...

They have working boats as well as pleasure boats.

This boat can't go down with five barrels on him, he can't!

Many trips in expensive sailboats end up on this beach, pulling a dinghy ashore.

I'm not sure what purpose it serves being here, but it sure does make for a pretty picture.

OK, maybe not for him.

The seas were various degrees of choppy as we worked our way around town.

Boat garage, in background.

We favor boat names here, and note that this is an alteration of how James Bond orders his drinks.

Cutest boat in the harbor.

I got in just ahead of a minor storm, but not in time to line this boat name up with threatening skies or big waves.

If you get two of those boats with the goalposts and space them apart 100 yards, you could play boat football and even kick field goals.

A little bit of fishing boat, some Old Glory, the Atlantic Ocean... what's not to love?

Chatham has a lot of boats. I went to the Orleans Yacht Club, asked why they had so few boats, and the lady said "Go visit Chatham."

Ol' Toothy gets some press...

He's very confident and much less menacing in Shark-Friendly environments.

Monomoy, as you know, means friendship.

No shortage of charming old docks, either...

See?

Her work is done for the day, but she doesn't look like she rests much.

One of our hosts...

God was pretty good to Chatham when Aesthetics were being discussed.

Another host...

You know that they only keep this boat around because they know it looks cool.

I got down at water level for this shot, but forgot to make it level in general.

This article needed one outflow pic.

This looks like it has been about to be put in the water for 40 years.

1974 Bronco

A quick trip to the beach never hurt anyone.

They build these oceanss right up to the marsh, huh?

If you can't afford a cabin cruiser, get a skiff and put a sleeps-two cooler in it.

It catches pizza and newspapers.

Not a bad place, if you can swing it.

Obligatory shell driveway

The porch ain't much, but the view rules...

The Chatham Shellfish Company in the background.

Thanks for having us, Chatham!