Y2K Midnight Observations

[Sptseditor@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/1/00 6:37:05 PM Eastern Standard Time, Chuckigo@aol.com 
writes:

<< although, i was absent during the Blizzard of '78.  ("19" 78 for any 4 
digit 
 purists <g>)  was there a ton of advance notice that the storm was going to 
 get that big and out of hand?  >>

If I can remember from what has been recounted to me, it wasn't warned that 
it would be a *major* storm, and in fact some schools opened the first day 
and were only dismissed after the weather started getting really bad. That 
may be the reason why we overreact nowadays when any storm is predicted, 
since that storm was (from what I gather) not taken that seriously and/or not 
forecasted quite well. Then again weather is unpredictable and it can change 
in an instant. After all, we do live in New England.

This is changing the topic slightly here, but I would love to find out the 
answer (maybe our resident meterologist can answer this for us) to how often 
does the weather get correctly predicted around here, how it differs from the 
national percentage of accurate predictions, and how much more accurate 
meterologists are nowadays that computers play a major role in forecasts.

-Sean