July Blog

During the last two weeks we have had no cause for complaint about the weather. It has been glorious - sunny, not excruciatingly hot, and above all, not a drop of rain. But before this latest spell of good weather, it was another story. After a dismal winter and a pathetic spring, we were really looking forward to a turnaround in June. But no, we had to accept that we were experiencing global cooling in our part of the world and June was quickly nicknamed "Juneary" by the locals. On the positive side we have had something to talk about and I have been able to indulge in my pet peeve - the unreliable weather forecasts. It infuriates me that they have such a low level of accuracy. One of my retirement projects is going to be the monitoring of the weather forecasts to de-termine how dependable they are. Going by my casual observations in Vancouver I have concluded that the forecasts are wrong about half of the time. This makes me wonder if taxpayers could not save a lot of money by Environment Canada getting rid of some of its 6 000 employees and using a dice for predictions instead. I know that it is clearly much harder to predict weather patterns along the coast, but I find it annoying that the weather reporters never admit their mistakes. Instead they surf over their short-comings with their Hawaiian shirts and evasive glib. I don't know if the situation is any better in Sweden, where the last winter was the warmest ever, or at least since 1756 when temperatures started being recorded. But it is refreshing to see that the weather service, SMHI, at least apologizes for their misses in the Annual Report. Further-more SMHI has just installed a supercomputer that has six times the power of its previous one. During each 24-hour period, four meteorological computations will project the land weather and two computations will project weather at sea. I have never before seen as detailed weather maps. There are even forecasts that can calculate how much wind power a specific wind mill can be expected to produce during the next few days. Back in Vancouver, the bad weather and the lousy forecasts have filled a void in dinner conversations what with real estate prices stalling and putting a damper on Vancouver's No 1 conversation topic!