It's back to battle stations here at the French Toast bunker. Pete Bouchard just tweeted:
Look, it's my job to say this (but it doesn't make it any easier): foot or so of snow possible Friday. No foolin'! #noreaster
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Mea culpa
By SwirlyGrrl
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 3:48pm
I scheduled a plane flight.
Mea culpa Etiam
By anon
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 5:16pm
I brought the sand and salt in this AM.
Mea maxima culpa
By 02132
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 7:48pm
We cleaned and drained the gas from the snow blower.
OK, no more screwing around
By Michael
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 3:56pm
Tell me how many people I have to sacrifice, and to which god(s), to make the wind stop and spring to arrive. I'm ready to go to jail for the rest of my life, if it means the exercise yard will be 60 degrees for the first few days of my sentence.
Friday is April Fool's
By anon
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:03pm
Friday is April Fool's Day.
Whit
If this is a joke
By Michael
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:29pm
...he should be fined for inciting a panic (at least in my heart, if nowhere else) the way the Lite Brite twins were.
Remember the April Fools Blizzard of 1997?
By UserGoogol
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 1:58am
That's what they said in 1997. I mean, except for the fact that it was a Tuesday.
As long as it is
By whyaduck
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:09pm
90 degrees on Saturday, than I will take it.
YAAA! Localized Flooding
By Matt_J
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:18pm
YAAA! Localized Flooding from melting snow! :)
I'm suspicious
By Kate
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:17pm
Friday = April Fools Day. And Bouchard says "No foolin'". Hmm.......
Joe Joyce, too
By adamg
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:32pm
Also forecasting a possible nor'easter on Friday.
Sorry, not a joke.
By Jeff F
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:35pm
Go check out any good weather site (Weather Underground, Weather.gov, noaa.gov, etc).
The exact snow/rain line is of course still uncertain, but there's a decent chance that Boston will be primarily on the snow side for much of Friday/Sat. Could get a decent chunk of snow for the weekend.
the silver lining is that the beginning of next week will be quite a bit warmer, so any snow that falls is likely to melt quickly.
It will be warm soon!
By Michael
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:42pm
Is it just me, or has that tune been playing for two months straight? Put up or shut up, Mother Nature.
Weather channel
By fibrowitch
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:38pm
Is just saying rain, not a word about snow. I hope they are just trying to fake us out. Once it stops snowing no one pays attention to the weather guys. At least not until June when we want someone to tell us the heat wave will end, or that it will not rain on the weekends.
Sounds like lazy forecasting
By Kaz
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 4:55pm
Last I heard from Matt Noyes is that the GFS ensemble is predicting the heavy snow for us...but it doesn't seem to agree with Europe or Canada models which predict us to be much closer to the snow/rain border and likely to get *some* snow, but mostly rain.
Caveat: that was yesterday and things change, but it sounds like they might just be hanging on the GFS and ignoring some of the other models (which have been a lot more accurate for us lately than the GFS).
Whoa, Nelly
By massmarrier
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 6:08pm
Because I'm tired of shoveling, I'll go with NECN's Nelly Carreno. She says there's still a good chance that the snow will track so that Boston only gets rain. You gotta believe, eh?
Bouchard on the TV-o-matic just now
By adamg
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 6:22pm
"80% shot" of a nor'easter on Fri. with "heavy, wet snow."
Bull-chard
By Kaz
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 9:13pm
Noyes on NECN is still predicting not likely serious with a chance for something plowable.
7 > NECN
By datadyne007
Tue, 03/29/2011 - 10:10pm
Bouchard's forecast is pretty much always more accurate than NECN's.
To everyone calling April Fools joke, Pete takes his job and his passion for weather way too seriously to ever joke about something like this.
Pete Bouchard always
By Kathode
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 9:49am
seems really worried and concerned about the forecast. Like the weather is his fault. Did he go to Catholic school?
Rising Barometer
By John-W
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 11:01am
Well if he did go to Catholic School, I bet he was popular with the Priests...
HA!!!!!!!
By Nude as the News
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 3:34pm
I was hoping someone would bring that clip up. It's infamous. The Soup had it in its year end countdown for 2009. The look he gives right after he delivers that infamous line is downright creepy. I'm not buying the bad monitor excuse, PB was clearly having a meltdown. (Guffaws abound...)
But in all seriousness John, they'd only be impressed if his bumhole was t-i-t-e.
That clip is a stupid
By datadyne007
Thu, 03/31/2011 - 10:51am
That clip is a stupid technical glitch. I wish people would stop bringing it up. It's old news.
Yeesh
By Kaz
Thu, 03/31/2011 - 10:59am
Look, Mrs. Bouchard. If we apologize for laughing at your son, will you leave us alone?
Maybe Mother Nature want to
By RhoninFire
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 10:17am
Maybe Mother Nature want to pull another April Fool's joke. We all had a good time the last the she pulled the same trick in 1997 (well I did, I was 8).
Foolish Storm
By SwirlyGrrl
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 10:44am
That makes you 8 years older than our landlord's kid, who was born that morning.
My husband and I went out every half hour and cleared off 2-4" of snow until about 2am when they left for Mt. Auburn - and they almost didn't make it. A Cambridge plow spotted them stuck at an intersection, radioed in that he was going off route, and plowed them all the way there.
Bouchard vs.NESN
By John-W
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 10:58am
No contest. NESN has been hiring Weather Cheerleaders for the past couple of years. They're good at what they do -- but of course there are other reasons why they are on a visual medium. They're not exactly wearing burqas. Now if they could only sexy-up Tim Kelley...show a little leg or something.
Panic v. Pretty
By massmarrier
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 12:11pm
Sure, I'd rather look at Nelly than Petey, but she also seems to know her stuff and she's been right on the past several storms and temp shifts. What I really like is that she isn't a drama queen like so many of our other weather people.
On this coming one, she has cautious for days about threatening us with lots of snow. While the other majors were quick to say 6 to 12 of wet, heavy snow in Boston, Nelly was saying it depending on the storm track, the movement of the following cold band and so forth. She is still calling for lots of rain in Boston, followed by a late 1 to 3 inches with plowable stuff north and west.
Let's see who's closer. Meanwhile, I appreciate not being jerked around by weather guys who like to share their fears. Harrumph.
First off...
By Kaz
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 4:25pm
It's NECN not NESN. Jerry Remy don't know millibars...just bats.
Secondly, I don't know how you can watch a few episodes of Matt Noyes' technical video blog and exactly come away thinking he's just a pretty face.
The man knows his stuff and he's occasionally shown to be more accurate than Bouchard before. But hey, it was a close race and there wasn't a lot on the line.
In the meantime, Bouchard posts occasionally on the WHDH weather blog, and that's nice...especially when he sticks his foot in his mouth about things barely tangentially related to weather. But Matt likes to talk about weather and analysis so much he's online nearly every day at 6:40 PM with a live webcast of the upcoming weather events where you can even ask questions if you think he's wrong. Seriously, check a few of those out if you think he's just a "cheerleader" and not knee-deep in charts, models, and predictive power.
It's when you can see the sausage made that suggests that when the guy making it says this'll be the best sausage he's ever made before, you can decide for yourself whether to believe him or not.
..heh...heh...
By John-W
Thu, 03/31/2011 - 10:38am
...you said ....sausage....
MFer
By benos
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 2:12pm
I'm so glad I'll be driving into the worst of it Friday evening on my way up to VT for, ironically, a snowshoeing expedition.
Seems like ch.7 is now playing it down significantly for Boston
By O-FISH-L
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 2:41pm
The lovely Dylan Dreyer today seems to disagree significantly with her boss, Chief Meteorologist Pete Bouchard's forecast from last night. Dylan writes, "the model that was calling for a major snowstorm is now calling for a major rainstorm." Funny, I thought Pete said last night that the models weren't going to get this one right and that "these storms have a way of creating their own cold." Seems all bases are covered.
As for Nelly Carreno, I like her but recall when she first arrived that there was a minor uproar because she has "only" a certificate in meteorology and not a degree. Important distinction years ago, but not today when the "computer models" determine the the forecast, except for Bouchard, that is.
Just a point of info
By Kaz
Wed, 03/30/2011 - 4:30pm
The "computer models" don't determine the forecast per se. The meteorologists have to interpret them still. And there's more than one. And they don't always agree. So, the nuance is knowing how well you can trust the latest trends for a particular model, based on particular information, that's also predicting a particular part of the equation (no one model tells you everything, some tell you precipitation, some tell you upper level pressures, some tell you surface pressures, some tell you temperatures...).
Then, once you've gleaned what you can trust out of each of those different parts of the modelling, you can put it all together to try and relate it to, say, patterns you've seen before that indicated a particular weather outcome...like "it'll all be snow" or "it'll all be rain".
This is part of the fun of listening to Matt Noyes on his analysis blog. You get to hear from him what his inferences are in the data and his past expectations of how the patterns will unfold based on the early modeling.
Foot of snow, huh?
By Kaz
Sat, 04/02/2011 - 11:00am
So, Bouchardians, odd how snow rhymes with "crow" and "I told you so".
Not much snow here, but over 8" in Fitchburg
By Ron Newman
Sat, 04/02/2011 - 12:59pm
from Boston.com: [url=http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art... get snow but they don't get the joke[/url]
This is why we need metric
By Kaz
Sat, 04/02/2011 - 4:40pm
12 inches makes a foot..so they didn't even get 3/4 of a foot. The article says Fitchburg received the most snow in the entire state.
Using 8 inches in Fitchburg (and less everywhere else) as an allusion to the "April Fools blizzard" just seemed like the kind of overhyped crap that often happens from the "please watch us!" local news crews these days.