Weather Maps for Dummies

Sample weather map

It seems that these days, most people get weather forecasts as pictures on a smartphone app, but if you're a true weather junkie – the sort who watches TWC (The Weather Channel) for hours on end – you still pore over weather maps. The dinosaurs who still read newspapers see them every day. The app generation, however, tends to have no idea how to interpret those maps, so it comes as no surprise that someone at eHow.com tried to address the question, "How Is a Weather Map Used?"¹ Unfortunately for those who read that answer, business and creative writing major Tyler Lacoma had no friggin' idea what he was talking about in his "answer."

According to Lacoma,

"Weather maps are very specific types of maps that show the current atmospheric conditions, including building weather patterns. Other types of maps oriented around landscapes, like topography maps, show permanent features of the land that change slowly and can be kept for years. Weather maps, on the other hand, portray constantly changing information that depends on current climate conditions."

We'll give Tyler the bit about impermanence (though there is no such thing as a "topography map"). We know he's full of it when he talks about "current climate conditions," but it's pretty typical of scientific illiterates to confuse climate with weather (cf. climate change skeptics). Lacoma's unfamiliarity with weather maps is readily apparent in the claim that, "Radar, satellite images, and other types of data are merged into one picture that can be viewed digitally or printed out." Those familiar with actual weather maps know that they contain neither radar nor satellite images. Instead, they graphically display pressure information, temperature information, and the locations of pressure systems and fronts. Even though the image chosen for this post clearly demonstrates the positions of high- and low-pressure systems and warm and cold fronts, Lacoma's mention of these essential elements of weather maps is limited to

"This shows scientists where different pressure fronts are... [and] Tropical waves, frontal zones, dry areas, and many other factors are shown on these maps..."

Tyler's "kitchen-sink" approach to the post, throwing all manner of tangentially-related information on the page, is typical of eHow's bull tossers: if you know nothing about a topic, just copy, reword and paste everything you think is related. To make matters worse, Lacoma not only doesn't answer the question, he also passes along misinformation. That's all we needed to choose him for Dumbass of the Day...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how-does_5489975_weather-map-used.html

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