This story will reveal the weather forecast for the total solar eclipse, Aug. 21.
Ha ha ha! You fell for that.
“There is a lot of clamoring for a forecast right now,” said Dave Murray, veteran meteorologist for KTVI (Channel 2). “Any meteorologist worth their lick of salt will say that’s just impossible. It’s a waste of anybody’s time to put something out there.”
Consider: Long-range forecasts weren’t too accurate for Thursday. At least, not in the ways that matter for viewing the transit of celestial bodies.
One of the earliest was issued around 3 p.m. on Aug. 3 by the National Weather Service in St. Louis. It was seven days out, the earliest the weather service will talk about a forecast.
It said Monday through Thursday of this week would be partly cloudy with highs in the lower 80s. Partly cloudy, according to the weather service, means the sky is between three-eighths and five-eighths covered by clouds. Plenty of room to see an eclipse.
Mostly cloudy means six- to seven-eighths. More than seven and it’s just plain cloudy.
On Saturday, the forecast improved to partly sunny. On Sunday, it got worse, to mostly cloudy. It bounced between partly and mostly cloudy for most of the week.
Murray appreciated where this was going. “This is a great project.”
The reality: At 1:16 p.m. on Thursday, in downtown St. Louis, the temperature was 85 degrees. Tiny patches of blue peeked from behind clouds. The sun was behind a cloud. The sky was well over seven-eighths covered by clouds. Not partly cloudy. Not mostly cloudy.
Cloudy. Eclipse-eclipsing cloudy.
Using typical criteria, the forecast for Thursday, issued seven days earlier wasn’t too far off. There were clouds but no rain in St. Louis. It was 85.
But the forecast was wrong by two degrees of cloudiness.
“This is a whole different kind of forecast,” Murray said. “I relate this to forecasting for the Cardinals. All people are interested in is the pinpoint of the stadium. They don’t care if it’s raining in Farmington. Well, this is the same kind of pinpoint forecast. The only issue is clouds, some clouds, no clouds. Doesn’t matter if it’s hot or humid.”
In fact, the whole sky doesn’t even matter, just the patch containing the sun and moon at 1:16 p.m.
Murray wasn’t going there. And he wasn’t alone.
“I can’t really give you an official forecast,” said Jim Sieveking, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in St. Louis.
The confidence in any forecast would be “very low,” he said. “I couldn’t begin to tell you what that day is going to be like.”
But if you were to begin to begin …
“There is some information about that period of time whether it will be warmer or colder than normal, if the pattern is going to be a wet pattern versus a dry pattern. But at this point telling people if it’s going to be sunny or cloudy 11 days out is futile.”
Sure, but if you had to say anything at all about which way it could go …
“Right, right. At this point it looks like, just looking at the models, it looks like the potential for warmer than normal. But as far as clouds, I can’t really give you an official forecast because we don’t do an official forecast until seven days out.”
OK, warmer than normal, but anything else?
“I mean, there are models that say certain things but it’s just a model, it’s just a computer program. And the further you go out in time, the more unreliable they are, so.”
OK, so those models say?
“It looks like a ridge of high pressure is going to be building across the center of the nation. But that upper level ridge depending on where it sets up, if it sets up a little further west, or a little further east, will have big impacts on where the cloud cover and precipitation chances are.
“The axis of where that high pressure is, usually a ridge of high pressure is warmer than normal and potentially free of clouds, but at this point, for our area we’re right on the edge. So it’s hard to say how it will play out right now.”
So we have the potential to be free of clouds — or the potential to be full of clouds?
“The ridge prevents clouds from forming. That’s the whole thing, if the ridge axis sets up on top of us, it should be hot and dry for that day, but if it sets up to the west, we could have showers and thunderstorms developing in the afternoon. Right now it’s too far out to be able to tell exactly.”
Anyway, Murray said the main show wasn’t the eclipse, but “what happens all around you.”
“OK, sure it’s cool to see the disc fade to black, but if you miss everything going on around you, you’ve missed 80 percent of the show. It’s just wild what will happen. It will get dark. The street lights will go on. The animals will behave differently. It could get 15 degrees cooler. There will be a tremendous effect, and people will have some bit of change in how they are thinking.”
Keep watching the forecasts, Murray said. They are bound to change many times before Aug. 21.
