What’s with all the dark clouds and raindrops cascading day after day down the online weather site? Even when it says a measly 20 or 30 percent chance of rain, the accompanying the forecast picture is always gray and foreboding.
It’s true that bad news makes the front page, but why not focus our weather expectations on the actual odds. When it says that 20 percent of the time it has rained when there were similar conditions, why doesn’t it say that EIGHTY percent of the time it was cloudy but dry those days?
I dug a little deeper into weather stats and found that although Astoria had 240 “cloudy” days last year, it didn’t rain at all on 50 of them. So there were 190 days with “some” precipitation, which leaves 175 totally dry days, and about half of the others it only drizzles a portion of the day. The way I do math, it’s much better than 50/50 that the weather on the coast will be perfectly delightful on any given day.
And the days we DO see raindrops? Well, it’s good for the ducks, I don’t have to water my lawn, my clothes are all drip-dry, there aren’t so many tourists on the boardwalk, and the movie theater is always open. So really, raindrop pictures on forecasts notwithstanding, it’s all very good indeed!