Weather Service concerns...

wsuffa

wsuffa

Touchdown! Greaser!
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well, that is certainly a productive use of time.
 
So stupid. Snow totals are never perfect or consistent. Take a yardstick round the yard next storm and see how much variation you can get.
 
I'm so glad they're investigating themselves. Society may not continue without accurate snow measurements!! ;)
 
Of course, there's a meme for that too...

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Snowfall varies in any given area, does it not? I would think that for aviation purposes, concern over measurement accuracies would arise more from bad temp, visibility, or storm data.
 
denverpilot said:
I'm so glad they're investigating themselves. Society may not continue without accurate snow measurements!! ;)
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As an IT guy, do you really ignore problems or do you try to identify root cause and prevent it from waking you up at 3AM again?

That's all that's going on here. Not all investigations are for wrongdoing. Most aren't in the context of a measurement.

If it's worth having snow measurements, it's worth having useful snow measurements. Can you imagine a more obvious waste than sending out people to measure something you care about so little that you don't have any quality controls? Do you do that in your organization?

Suppose you got an alert that your UPS was providing 100 VAC. Then you get there and all the other devices measure 120 VAC. Would you really do nothing, or would you fix the errant measurement?
 
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Becky said:
Snowfall varies in any given area, does it not? I would think that for aviation purposes, concern over measurement accuracies would arise more from bad temp, visibility, or storm data.
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For an airport, snow depth measurements have obvious effects on staffing for snowplows and other snow/ice removal equipment. Snow depth is irrelevant for airborne aircraft aside from underplowed runways and taxiways or blocked gates. Snow depth does not determine visibility. That comes from wind.
 
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MAKG1 said:
For an airport, snow depth measurements have obvious effects on staffing for snowplows and other snow/ice removal equipment. . . .
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Well, yeah, to an extent. But I think that the difference between 0" and 6" is more significant than the difference between 18" and 24".

Rich
 
Washington's official reporting location is DCA, as I understand it. Anyway, being on the river, it's not a good indicator of conditions in the metro DC area in general.
 
Well, this morning, I had to put my car into an un-plowed parking spot in the DCA economy lot. I noted that the snow was considerably less than in my front yard where I got between 20 and 23inches.
 
MAKG1 said:
For an airport, snow depth measurements have obvious effects on staffing for snowplows and other snow/ice removal equipment.
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One of my employees husbands is in DCA ops and rest assured, this weekend, every man woman and child who can drive a loader was at the airport working long shifts.
 
Sundancer said:
Washington's official reporting location is DCA, as I understand it. Anyway, being on the river, it's not a good indicator of conditions in the metro DC area in general.
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It is indeed which is sort of laughable since it's not in the District. Inches outside of it but it is outside.
 
flyingron said:
It is indeed which is sort of laughable since it's not in the District. Inches outside of it but it is outside.
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There is a little speck of land built on fill that was never ceded to VA and is legally still in the district.
 
weilke said:
There is a little speck of land built on fill that was never ceded to VA and is legally still in the district.
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Nope. There's no need to cede anything. The boundary between the Maryland and Virginia has been since 1632 the further bank of the Potomac. All of the Virginia parts of DC were retroceded back to Virginia in 1791 (to the low water mark) and in 1847 using the same definition as for Maryland (furthest bank). Anything contiguous with the land on the Virginia side is Virginia. There are a few confusing places. Columbia Island which is very close to the Virginia shore indeed is an Island and part of the District.

The question about fill and other structures protruding from the Virginia side has been decided in the courts, over the years. They are part of Virginia.

All of National Airport is in Virginia. Always has been. The water lapping up on the shore is the boundary.

The other quaint piece of DC property is the westbound lanes of the Wilson Bridge. There is a tiny sliver of the DC border that passes through these lanes (where as the rest of the bridge from the Virginia shoreline east is in Maryland).
Due to some quaint earlier decisions this was used to give DC control over operation of the bridge which has led to some laughable consequences.
 
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MAKG1 said:
As an IT guy, do you really ignore problems or do you try to identify root cause and prevent it from waking you up at 3AM again?



That's all that's going on here. Not all investigations are for wrongdoing. Most aren't in the context of a measurement.



If it's worth having snow measurements, it's worth having useful snow measurements. Can you imagine a more obvious waste than sending out people to measure something you care about so little that you don't have any quality controls? Do you do that in your organization?



Suppose you got an alert that your UPS was providing 100 VAC. Then you get there and all the other devices measure 120 VAC. Would you really do nothing, or would you fix the errant measurement?
Click to expand...


Umm, I actually care so little about a change in "official snow depth", I'm guessing I won't be "losing any sleep" over it, and certainly not awakened at 3AM.

Been a really long time since anything woke me up at 3AM anyway. We do this thing called "redundancy" because it's cheap.

If my UPS was reading 100 VAC the data center monkeys would already be on it. They're cheap too. Haha. And frankly, getting cheaper every year...

So even though I can imagine more "obvious waste", not much. It's snow. It piles up. You shovel it. Who cares if it's an inch or an inch and a tenth? Nobody. Go shovel it and drive to work. Sheesh.

(And no I don't need any stories about hydrologists needing it for predicting river flows and what not. I know. But have zero reason to care in the slightest.)
 
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