Passive weather modification?, page 1

A few days back, I was sitting here watching light s**w flurries fall. As usual, I opened up weather.com to see how long it would last and how hard it was likely to get. I knew they had been calling for cloudy weather, but not for any snow. Astonishingly, I saw nothing on the radar map. No flurries, no little specks of light green popping in and out of existence, nothing! A few days before that I was checking on things and there were light green areas all around me, pretty much covering the map, but not a single drop of rain or s**w fell that day. Not one drop. The forecast had been for light showers.

Now I understand how weather radar works. I know, for instance, that the sensitivity can be easily adjusted to filter out noise from pollution. I know that the elevation of the antenna can be adjusted to show higher or lower precipitation locations in the atmosphere, and that conditions between atmospheric layers can vary appreciably. There is nothing conspiratorial or sinister about having this flexibility. Obviously this manipulation was responsible for the inaccuracies I experienced, but on both occasions the result was skewed toward the predictions and not randomly. Coincidence? Possibly. I do not have sufficient data to verify or deny any such activity, since I am observing one location only and have not looked into this for very long.

However, it did get me to wondering something... weather is chaotic. I have seen storms pouring water down from the sky a mere 100 yards from absolutely no precipitation. I have seen temperatures vary by more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit within the span of a half-mile. Such extreme manifestations are rare, yes, but become more frequent as the extremes decrease. It is nothing to have the temperature vary by 5 degrees within that half-mile, for instance.

I also know that I (and I would presume many others as well) have developed a tendency to rely on weather information from TV and the Internet rather than to venture outside. After all, it is difficult to tell the exact temperature based on how cold or hot it feels. Weather reports give exact information, or at least attempt to. It is also hard to know exactly how much rain has fallen or is falling in the general area based solely on what one can see outside their window. So weather reports give us this broader information that we can easily access to find out how typical what we see outside is in the area.

But can that be manipulated? Could those radar reports I saw have been intentionally skewed to make the reports seem closer to the forecasts? Could the temperature readings be taken from those sensors that more closely resemble what should have been, instead of taking pure averages? And could these slightly skewed readings be used to bolster a belief that we know more about forecasts than we actually do? Or am I just paranoid?

This is not to knock meteorology; I consider the science a huge benefit for mankind. But just like any science, it can be skewed. My question is: is it being skewed, and for what purpose? I urge all who read this to start checking things out in your location. Are the reports accurate? When they are inaccurate, do they indicate compliance toward the forecasts, or is it more randomized? And is any misinformation coming from specific sources, or is it across the board?

www.weather.com...

TheRedneck