Followers Beware: Tweets on Seemingly Inevitable Storms Often Wrong

This morning provided another reminder that, in our eyes at least, tweeting meteorologists are putting too much predictive emphasis on emerging radar echoes and, in their efforts to be precise, forgetting that storms die out, rebuild and change directions. At a minimum, they'd be wise to at least use more cautionary wording like "may" or "if it holds together" when discussing the movement of storms seemingly headed for the metro.

This morning, Sven Sundgaard detailed with seeming certainty the arrival of morning storms per the graphic below. With our hopelessly untrained eye, we looked at the radar shortly after 7 and wondered if that would actually happen. For one, the storms were a relatively long way away (though moving very quickly) and it seemed puzzling that one could speak with such certainty given the distance the storms still had to travel. For the fun of it, we tweeted close to 8 a.m. that we had our doubts. But it wasn't until close to 9 a.m. that Sven acknowledged that the storms indeed were going to miss the most of the metro.

Tweet issued at 7:07 a.m.

Amateur tweet at 7:59 a.m.

Tweet issued at 8:44 a..m.

Conversely, we did note that Jonathan Yuhas, whose tweets were off the mark during the day and evening of the U2 concert employed wording that acknowledged merely the possibility of storms arriving in the metro.

 It's baffling to us why many forecasters continue to make pronouncements of impending storms in such certain terms, particularly when storms are still a decent distance away. Why not use tweets to put us on alert and then communicate with more certainty when storms are truly on the doorstep. Doesn't that make more sense?

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