My weekly column over at Civil Beat questions whether the reporting on Tropical Storm Flossie was more than a bit over the top (“Hawaii Monitor: Weathering the Storm“).
Why does weather like this draw so much coverage? Here’s part of the answer.
Reporting potentially extreme weather is a lot like reporting crime, courts, or celebrity news. It’s relatively easy (and cheap) to produce, doesn’t require independent digging, and lends itself to sensational “pay attention or you’ll be very sorry” coverage that attracts an audience.
Anyway, you should be able to read the column for free. If you’ve used up your free views, let me know.
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My MidWeek column next week will outline the history of local weather reporting and suggest ways to realign the coverage.
Get ready for a do-over. Hurricane Gil is chugging toward the Islands at roughly the same path as Flossie.
Nate Silver has a really interesting discussion of this phenomenon in ‘The Signal and the Noise’. In short, weather forecasts from commercial outlets have a (possibly unintentional) statistical bias toward extremes that is not present in forecasts from the National Weather Service.
hate to be a pooper…..
but if Flossie had been twice as bad, would you have written the same piece?
i seriously doubt it. you can’t predict the future. as you know by now, i have no problem criticizing the media and its weakening coverage. but this particular topic is worse than Monday morning quarterbacking? because weather CAN BE A MAJOR RISK and, as such, it is in fact newsworthy. can the coverage be better? yes.
but ignoring potentially bad weather is, well, ignorant. we know damn well how much trouble KHON KITV and HNN would be in if they gave Hawaii a pathetic 48-hour notice of a hurricane.
Watching the radar as Flossie approached seemed to justify the warnings, which were actually not too extreme. The lack of really big crowds at the local Longs and Safeway kind of indicated to me that there was not much panic, but reasonable caution, perhaps.
Then, watching the radar late Monday as the storm approached the shoreline of Oahu, it looked really strange to me to see the rain intensity drop off exactly along the line of the shore. That’s when Flossie died.
It could easily have gone differently.
I watched a bit of coverage and did not think it was over the top. This was not a hurricane, and no one said it was.
Also, I was one of perhaps 50-60 people who attended a FEMA first-responders training last Monday. I think that gave me even more respect for the need to get information to the public. Basically, I learned that no one will likely come to my aid if I haven’t taken necessary precautions myself. So I did fill some bottles with water and check the batteries in the emergency lights.
The idea of storm warnings is not to be accurate but to inform so that we may take appropriate precautions. So far, so good, IMHO.
This stuff stimulates the economy. Just wait until next year when City Mill, Home Depot, Costco et. al. have to make last year’s figures.
I don’t watch TV, but I saw a couple of news reports on line. I got most of my information on the storm by watching the radar on line and looking at the sea surface temperature map.
The couple of reports I did see on line didn’t seem over the top. I thought they stressed the right amount of caution, but certainly not panic. However, yesterday I was talking to a friend in California who said that not only was Hawaii not completely ignored this time, but their reporting made it sound like dooms-day was raining down on us and it was only a matter of moments until the entire state was obliterated from the planet.
There was zero coverage of the mudslides that brought 6 feet of water and mud from Makena to Kaupo and no connection with how a woman could be bit by a shark yesterday in 10 feet of water in nearby Wailea. The overdoing of the coverage could be forgiven if they actually focused on the whole state and not just Honolulu for the aftermath. Obviously if nothing happened to Bishop Street, all is good in Hawaii.
Watching the radar when the storm was 10 nautical miles from Waimanalo & reading the reports of cloud-to-ground lightning & loss of power on Maui, I’d hardly call keeping a close watch ‘too much’ coverage. But the ‘hurricane-like, we’re all gonna die’ coverage? Well, that’s a different story. Don’t know how they’d strike a balance, though – remains to be seen.
For most of the day on Maui this past Monday, it certainly appeared that the media’s Flossie coverage had been terribly over-blown. Landfall for Maui was predicted to be 2:00 p.m., but all afternoon we had only a very light misty rain and complete calm here in Ha’iku. Then at 5:35 p.m., Flossie arrived and beat the living crap out of us for a full hour … 50 mph gusts, deafening claps of thunder and forked lightening bolts, one of which struck a utility pole just up the road, knocking out power, telephone and internet … a trifecta. Media coverage? Just about right, I’d say!