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Yes! As a west coast native and sometime visitor to the midwest, I'd say that is true for the whole western US at least. If you learn to read the forecasts and

Yes! As a west coast native and sometime visitor to the midwest, I'd say that is true for the whole western US at least. If you learn to read the forecasts and maps you can actually start to grok it and intuit the mechanics. You can start to imagine the jet stream whipping like a hose and understanding that the exact rate of its swing might vary, causing weather fronts to sweep across the plains a little earlier or a little later, or steering the atmospheric river a little north or south as it sprays the coast. This is the mechanism behind those sudden wild changes in Chicago, when you switch between northern to southern weather in a single day. And in the short-term data, you can watch a radar animation and get pretty good at predicting when a rain wall or big thunder cell is going to cross your location, and what to expect on a quick errand. The only thing you cannot reason your way through is when the maps indicate large areas of instability and you really just have to set your mental threat condition and wait to see whether something erupts over your head or not. Afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains or coasts often have this uncertainty to them.

labster 8y ago
Nah, midlatitude west coasts are worse because of the lack of good data over the oceans. Satellites can't tell you as much as you think, especially in the vertical direction. Knowing how much water is in a column of air is useful, but not as useful as if you knew precisely which layers it was in. A considerable amount of data in models for California is from observations that were made in China and Japan, that flow with the wind across the Pacific. Or conversely, you can look at it as a data hole that advected across the ocean, too. I'd like to note that of the few blown forecasts we get in Southern California, almost none of them have to deal with the jet stream. It's actually the cut-off lows offshore that don't have steering winds, which makes it difficult to predict where it will go next. The same is true with hurricanes.

labster 8y ago

Nah, midlatitude west coasts are worse because of the lack of good data over the oceans. Satellites can't tell you as much as you think, especially in the vertical direction. Knowing how much water is in a column of air is useful, but not as useful as if you knew precisely which layers it was in. A considerable amount of data in models for California is from observations that were made in China and Japan, that flow with the wind across the Pacific. Or conversely, you can look at it as a data hole that advected across the ocean, too. I'd like to note that of the few blown forecasts we get in Southern California, almost none of them have to deal with the jet stream. It's actually the cut-off lows offshore that don't have steering winds, which makes it difficult to predict where it will go next. The same is true with hurricanes.