Sunny and Hot with a Chance of Armageddon

When you hear the phrase “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS)” you have probably already stopped reading or fallen asleep before you even get to the first joke. In case you aren’t familiar with them, the good pocket-protector-wearing people at weather branch of the NOAA are responsible for some of the most accurate, most up-to-date and most mind-numbingly boring weather reports you’ll ever read.

I know most weather reports aren’t exactly spine-tingling fare, but the NOAA perfected the art of being succinct back when Twitter sounded like the name of some character in a Disney cartoon. Here’s the typical text for an NOAA weather forecast:

Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 95. Calm wind becoming east southeast around 5 mph.

That’s it. No “brilliant sunshine” or “hot and humid” or even “very sunny.” A grand total of 86 characters. Adjectives are for the weak. Oh, and I added the italics myself. The NOAA would never try to stoop to that level.

The weather people at the NOAA aren’t robots, of course. They know that most people are too lazy to read actual words about the weather, so they also use the time-honored method of posting little weather symbols on their website, to let you know what the sky will look like over the next several days. Instead of a little sunshine with sunglasses or a cloud holding an umbrella the always literal National Weather Service sticks to the these realistic expectations of what you can expect to see if you ventured outside and looked upward.

So far, so good, right? They even have little icons which show what the sky will look like at night if, God forbid, there was nothing good on TV or all the power on the East Coast blew out. Of course, it wasn’t good enough to just have one little icon for the weather at night. They actually have different icons for “Mostly Clear” and “Partly Cloudy” evenings. The icons are so realistic that people have actually navigated lost ships back to port safely using just those little pictures.

WTF NOAA?

Based on all this information, you can surely understand my alarm when, in the midst of a heat wave here in my part of the United States I went to visit the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service and instead of the usual staid, boring, almost soothing scientific description of the weather, I found the symbol you see here on the right:

Exploding sun with blood-red sky! Armageddon is upon us! Repent as all human civilization melts and burns under the oppressive heat of the fires of Hell! This morning was partly sunny and warm, but the planet Earth become a roaring ball of flame and liquid magma This Afternoon!

It’s that hot outside. It’s so hot the sky and the seas are turning red and boiling away.

But surely the end of the planet couldn’t be so close! I hadn’t read about it on any community calendars or heard it talked about at any of my monthly staff meetings. Just to be sure I had to check around at some other weather sites. Most just mentioned that it was going to be extra hot for the next few days. Some told me “stay indoors” and to “get to a pool” or even “take frequent breaks during the day if working outside” but none of them mentioned red skies and melting mountains. That is, until, I read the weather report from the New York Times:

On Tuesday the sun will be slightly larger.

Yep, on really hot days the sun actually gets larger and even becomes a little less yellow. The forecast does not mention if Superman’s powers will be negatively affected by this strange weather.

It’s at times like this, when I’m spending a lot of time looking at various websites, that I’m reminded of an old seaman’s adage about the color of the sun at different times of the day. I think it goes something like this:

Or, as the NOAA’s National Weather Service likes to say: Tuesday: Sunny and hot, with a high near 100. Calm wind becoming south southeast around 5 mph.

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