Shucking Oysters: Wuthering Frights
By Alex Allen
Got to love this time of year. Incessant rain, storms, power outages, ferry cancellations and possibly, losing your marbles. These extreme weather events seem to be starting a lot earlier every year. Remember October? We had four power outages, countless atmospheric rivers and a few bomb cyclones. There has never been a more exciting time to be obsessed with the weather.
Being a meteorologist is not an easy job. If your forecast ends up being wrong, everyone will blame you, and even if you get the forecast right, people will still complain(in Canada). By its nature, forecasting involves prediction. Like tarot card reading, James Howson wrote “telling the future can be accompanied by a vagueness which enraptures and mystifies the beholder.” While Nostradamus may have predicted asteroids and zombies, “the weather forecaster deals with something more prosaic yet not without extreme outcomes.”
Canada has just introduced a new colour-coded warning system, that aligns with the World Meteorological Organization which focuses on what the weather will do (risks, impacts, safety actions) rather than what the weather will be (100 mm of rain). The lowest and most common alert level is yellow indicating localized moderate impacts. These may include Baynes Sound Connector cancellations, flying debris like pine cones and four-hour power outages. The next level, orange, covers more significant damage, like wind / ice storms, falling trees and days of power outages. Red alerts are the most severe, with prolonged dangerous and possibly life-threatening weather, like structural damage to houses or buildings. As the federal government eloquently explained, “Canada’s switch enhances its weather services to meet modern challenges, delivering clear, consistent, and actionable information aligned with international standards for public safety.”
Meanwhile, special weather statements will continue to be used under the new system, as the least urgent form of messaging. The statements typically advise of uncommon conditions and the potential for concern, which on some winter days, can read like Emily Brontë had written them. By focusing on the weather impacts rather than the weather itself, the main goal of the colour codes is to enhance storm preparedness and better communicate how we can prepare in advance.
Back in the day, a typical weather report would start like this: “Welcome to the weather forecast. Now, let’s see what the weather is like today. In the north it’s very windy and cold. There is a chance of some rain too, so don’t leave home without your umbrella. In the east it’s rainy all day today, I’m afraid. In the west the weather is dry, but cloudy. So no rain for you, but it is quite windy. The south has the best weather today, sunny all afternoon.”
Instead, we get meteorology 101 reports: warned about the atmospheric river weather system that’s going to bring in 70 to 100 mm of rain. Or the bomb cyclone expected to bring wind gusts of up to 100 km per hour. And then throw in a quote from some well-meaning qualified expert: “We’re calling it a big skinny fire hose because when you look at the satellite and the radar it’s really quite amazing how if it shifted to the north or south it would drastically change the outcome.”
As for the bomb cyclone, that’s probably a new one for some of you who are not weather geeks. The Weather Channel (MTV for old people) defines this condition as “having undergone bombogenesis or bombing-out.” It happens when a low pressure system drops rapidly, resulting in a “bomb-like explosion” of winter weather madness. Cool.
Today, every weather event is “intense,” “severe,” “extreme,” “rapidly deepening,” “aggressive,” “hitting” and “brewing.” It’s like having Mr. Rogers and his neighbourhood taken over by Freddy Krueger of Elm Street. And I’m guessing that you already know that we Canadians are obsessed about the weather. If we can’t incessantly talk about polar vortexes, nine out of ten of us will make a point of checking the Weather Channel at least twice a day.
And it’s not just us. The US has the 24-hour streaming service, Fox Weather. As their press release said, they want to “capitalize on the increasingly frightening state of Earth’s daily forecasts” and “aim to make the science of meteorology more relevant to people’s lives.”
You can get alerts for 42 kinds of weather and learn about funnel clouds and graupel (a type of soft hail). Fox Weather also has a few storm chasers who race around documenting the many hurricanes and tornadoes ripping across America. Instead of watching fire logs burning 24-7, now you can watch the Kīlauea volcano spewing fountains of lava into the air. Or drone videos of tornadoes tearing through a Houston neighbourhood. You can even learn which FIFA teams will get an edge in the games from the hot weather.
“Weather is ideally suited to the electronic age,” wrote Bernard Mergen, a professor of American Studies, in his book Weather Matters. “It’s constantly in motion, frequently fast-moving… ubiquitous and visually beautiful.” And it’s in this digital age that our interest in the elements is being turbocharged by the growth of weather-related media, especially online.
We talk about weather because it’s an easy topic of conversation, David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada, points out. “It’s not as if you’re going to get that faraway look when you bring up sex or politics or religion, and people are wondering where you’re going with it. Weather is a safe topic of conversation.” Say, did you hear about the intense, frigid….
