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Drew as Eragon – Arts Run 2008, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I must admit to feeling a bit of a hopeless photographer-Dad in that I have terrible trouble getting decent pictures of my own kids. This is partly due to the fact that I’m not particularly comfortable taking people photos at the best of times (some people seem to have the knack of getting models to be at ease and look their best – I’m not one of them) and part of it is that the boys tend to run around faster than my focusing and framing skills can handle.

Last weekend, however, we went into downtown Austin and the boys and Nikki ran in the 2008 Arts Run – a kids’ K and 5K raising funds for the Paramount and State Theatres. It was a fun event with a lot of the runners in costume (“Dress as your favourite film character”), Drew was dressed as Eragon but had a hard time keeping his helmet on. In the end, I got to hang on to it during the race but I did get one cute photo of him before the helmet got the heave.

Hurricane Ike is now fizzling out somewhere over Arkansas and the folks in Galveston and Houston are starting the clean-up but it got me thinking about weather forecasting over here. Once again, the forecasts of dire weather in Austin proved misguided. We had a windier than average morning but nothing particularly noteworthy and absolutely no rain. At 10pm last night, however, we were looking at 30-50mph winds and 2″-6″ of rain according to the local forecasters.

I understand that forecasting is an extremely difficult operation and that forecasts more than a couple of days in the future are little more than educated guesswork (thanks to all those butterflies flapping their wings in Africa) but I would have thought that a forecast made for a mere 8-10 hours in the future would be pretty close to correct. Thinking back, though, it seems that many warnings of perilous conditions here end up being somewhat overblown – thunderstorms are seldom as severe as we are led to believe, ice storms cripple the town for a shorter period than expected and high winds don’t quite live up to their TV billing.

Given that many of us (myself included) make a point of watching TV news a lot more in periods of severe weather, I have to wonder if there is a commercial consideration at play here. If bad weather brings eyes to the TV and more eyes means higher ratings and more advertising dollars, surely more bad weather or, at least, reports of impending bad weather are better for the TV stations? Am I being cynical, I wonder?

Aside from severe weather days, though, there is definitely a lot of weather sensationalism in the news. Consider temperature reporting. In addition to the actual forecast temperature, we are generally given “wind chill” temperatures in the winter (which are always below the air temperature) and “heat indexes” (which are always above the air temperature) in the summer. Hmmm… maybe I should stick with the National Weather Service forecasts in the future.

(Edit at 10:30pm: Kudos to the meteorologist on Channel 7 this evening who admitted that today’s Austin forecast was hopelessly wrong. He really seemed sorry so I’ll let him off this time ).