The weather in and near
Chicago is very
unpredictable, due to where we get our
weather from. Usually it comes from
the West, pretty standard weather for the time of year. Occasionally it comes from
Canada, which can drop the normal temp 30 degrees. It also comes from
the South, making tempuratures rise. Apparantly it is very hard to predict which one of these
jet streams we will be recieving because
weather forecasters do only slightly better than the results that
flipping a coin would yield.
To make problems worse, we have
Lake Michigan. In the Spring, it can be
borderline jacket weather in my
suburb, but when I go to the city, it will be much colder than that, because the lake is cold from the winter. See:
Lake effect. The opposite happens in the Fall.
To make matters even more worse, the media has made it a hobby to
use the weather to scare the bejesus out of people. Eg: Next on
Fox News at 9: 4 foot snowfalls! Go out and buy
canned foods and
bottled water! You won't be able to leave your house for days! Much later in the program they will tell you (very quickly) that there is a 20% chance of this happening. I think they do this so people will stay tuned and watch the news until the weather comes on.
In short, I
stopped caring about what the weather is going to be, I just go by how it is outside now. Yeah, it gets me into
trouble occasionally, but it seems to save a lot of hassle listening to
weathermen who can't predict weather. Its not thier fault though, the
dynamics of weather in this area just make it
hard to do.