How the Weather Channel Braces for a Snowstorm
When a big winter storm is being predicted, if you’re like me, you try to work up a good amount of panic at least 24 hours before a snowflake actually descends from the sky. Thus, I was front and center watching the Weather Channel on Monday morning to absorb as much as possible about what has been dubbed Winter Storm Stella.
I know there are some among you who don’t bother to check out a weather forecast, who feign a casual, “Oh, is it supposed to snow?” when it comes up in conversation. If I’ve described you, you are among the most irritating people on earth. I am the sort of weather anticipator who breaks into a sweat thinking about waist-high drifts, who runs around the house putting fresh batteries in the flashlights, who elbows aside little old men for that last gallon of whole milk in the supermarket.
Monday morning, the Weather Channel was in full impending-snow-emergency mode, its various anchors and correspondents fanned out up and down the East Coast, from Washington, D.C., northward to Philadelphia and New York City. The Emperor of the Weather Channel, Jim Cantore, was of course given the plum site of Boston, because the muscular, bullet-headed Cantore operates best where a city is socked in and he can give us that calm, reassuring Cantore baritone, even as gusty winds seem to blow the snow straight down his throat as he talks.
The Weather Channel understands that its key to drama is to broadcast as much as it can from outside the studio, even if doing so makes no sense. Thus the early-day coverage of Stella was anchored by Stephanie Abrams standing on a dry Manhattan street, reading temperatures from her cellphone. She was swaddled head-to-toe in warm clothing, which is a little Weather Channel counterintuitive, since Abrams’s most ardent fans make it clear on YouTube that they prefer to see her in a cozy, warm studio.
By noon, with nary a cloud in the sky, the Weather Channel was conducting a phone interview with Kathryn Garcia from the New York Department of Sanitation. Garcia is clearly a native New Yorker, succinct and blunt. “Are you fully funded for snow of this magnitude?” she was asked. “Yes,” she replied. “What do you tell people to do to prepare for this?” Garcia: “Be prepared.” The channel’s meteorologist, Alexandra Steele, was eager to tell co-anchor Mark Elliot that it costs a lot to clean up Manhattan: “It used to be, just a few years ago, it was $1 million per inch of snow. Now it’s over $2 million an inch!”
Cut to TWC’s Paul Goodloe in sunny Philadelphia. The anchors quizzed Goodloe: “It’s a ‘code blue,’ we hear — what’s that?” “Yeah, code blue just because it’s so cold,” replied Goodloe, coolly relaxed. A few minutes later, perhaps realizing he wasn’t hyping the impending potential disaster sufficiently, Goodloe could be heard yelping, “Flakes are flying, eight to 10 hours from now!” That’s more like it: describing terrible weather before it occurs. Now there’s a man I’d shove aside for the last loaf of bread in my local 7-11.
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