I am constantly amazed by the general public's utter lack of faith in
weather prediction.  It's a science like any other, with a tremendous number
of variables, some of which are very well understood and some of which are
only now being slowly untangled.  For those who insist that forecasting is
unreliable, I'd humbly suggest that they're not looking in the right places
or listening to the right forecasts.  The weather forecasting we use for a
lot of our farm work gives us monthly, 10-day, weekly, 3-day and 1-day
forecasting outlooks, with greater and greater reliability as the time
interval grows shorter.  When there is a great deal of uncertainty in the
forecast, they say so.  When there's a lot of confidence, they'll say that
too.  Sometimes there is, sometimes there's not.  When the European computer
models differ greatly from American predictions, which does occasionally
happen, we get both forecasts for planning purposes.  Do they sometimes mess
up the forecast?  Sure they do; show me 100% reliability in any scientific
discipline and I'll be really impressed.  Is their accuracy high and getting
higher all the time?  Yup, with a reliability now approaching 95% or better
for daily forecasting.  I'd challenge any of us to do better in our own
specialties.

One very good example of that was the Sandy superstorm for the northeast a
few years ago.  European forecasts had that one nailed, while American
forecasting put it further out to sea until right before landfall.  Had
someone been watching the 6 o-clock news, they would have gotten the
American forecast right up until the bitter end.  Had they been using
professional forecasting services with access to those other forecasting
tools, they would have received a heads-up of the potential for a
catastrophic storm a solid week in advance.  So many of the problems with
weather forecasting are not in the predictions, but in educating the public
on how to use the forecasting tools which are already available, and how to
determine which "expert" is really an expert.  Hint: most TV weather
forecasters aren't even educated as meteorologists.  They're educated as
journalists.  Big difference.

So towards the question of "what can we possibly measure today to predict
the weather tomorrow?", there well may be quite a few variables which can be
measured.  I'm not the one who would be able to say what they are; my
specialties are not in meteorology.  But someone who would know, or at least
would know who knows, is Cliff Mass, a meteorology professor and researcher
at the University of Washington.  He writes an every-other-day weather blog
at http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ which goes into great detail about our
weather forecasting skills, and what we can (or can't) forecast.  He talks
about the strengths and weaknesses of American weather forecasting models vs
some of the others (the Europeans have a much more recent system than we do,
and their forecasting skills reflect that), and he talks about both the
large-scale weather patterns and the localized conditions which determine
whether I'll get rain or sun or wind or frost tomorrow.  His forecasting is
typically for the Pacific Northwest but he'll occasionally talk about other
storms or weather issues in other regions.  He had a lot to say about Sandy.

Another good one is Rufus La Lone, who is an agricultural entomologist
working out of Oregon.  He made the connections years ago between
agricultural activities, insect activities, disease issues and weather
patterns.  He has been instrumental in disseminating what we know (and don't
know) about those inter-relationships within the western US ag community.
He provides a twice-weekly forecast for the Pacific Northwest at
http://ovs.com/wx-cafe, which includes suggestions for planting, irrigation,
IPM, cultural disease control methods and other agricultural management
decisions based on recent and upcoming weather patterns.  I suspect he would
be extremely interested in this bee research, and either have direct
knowledge of how weather could affect bee behavior, or he'd know someone who
does.
Kathryn Kerby
Frogchorusfarm.com
Snohomish, WA

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