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When it comes to weather, negatives outweigh the positives

Weather forecasters and creative writers share the ability to accentuate the mundane and embellish the boring
2018-08-05 hawke humidex.jpg
Lake Couchiching is shown under a beautiful sky ... an image weather forecasters would probably ruin with their penchant for being negative. David Hawke/OrilliaMatters

A trait shared by both weather forecasters and creative writers is the ability to accentuate the mundane, embellish the boring, until it becomes quite exciting. To be a creative writer, one does not need to be a weather forecaster, but to forecast the weather one does need a good aptitude for creative thinking.

This can be seen daily in any forecast: “Tomorrow morning will have a 10 per cent chance of showers, turning to 30 per cent by afternoon.” In other words, dear reader, there is a 90 per cent chance of sunshine in the morning, and despite the possibility of a few clouds floating in later on, still a 70 per cent probability of continued sunshine!


The other part of creative weather forecasting is to make it sound so much worse than it really is: “a gentle breeze will waft about the countryside, occasionally being punctuated by damaging gusts of wind”. Therefore, don’t fall asleep in that hammock, dear vacationer, as you could wake up on the other side of Lake Simcoe! Oh sure, you can lay there, but be ever vigilant for that rogue gust … it can come out of nowhere! At any time! Never let your guard down, especially while on a relaxing vacation.

As we all well know, this summer has been wickedly hot, and oft-heard are the good old sayings “hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk”, or “must have been 104 in the shade”.

Unfortunately, I believe Health Canada now prohibits the frying of eggs on sidewalks, and 104 degrees Fahrenheit is actually only 40 degrees in Celsius, and thereby loses a lot of verbal impact in the translation. May I suggest "hot enough to melt your plastic-paper money"? No? Okay, you come up with something better.

Are weather forecasters happy giving us dire warnings of temperatures in the high twenties or even mid-thirties? Nope, they feel we must have more drama in the daily report.

So, in 1965, we Canadians came up with a system to make hot temperatures sound even more miserable, a thing called the Humidex (which sounds like a Superman arch-villain to me, but then I wasn’t asked to be on the naming committee).






Wind chill is a combination of air temperature and wind speed, with the resultant number being how cold you’d think it was if standing naked atop a snow bank. Minus ten with a gusty wind (there’s that awful ‘gust’ brought into play again) makes you think it’s minus twenty, even though it’s actually just minus ten.

But, if you are standing naked atop a snow bank, I don’t think you really care about these finer points of weather prognostication anyways; you probably have other things on your mind, like "how did I get here?"

There should be a T-shirt manufacturer that can print up snappy slogans on a whim, with red and yellow wiggly lettering that says, “I survived Humidex 38!” or for the foolishly brave: “Humidex 41 … bring it on!”.



I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a nap on the hammock, even if there is a three per cent chance of torrential rain ... I think I can risk it.