A Blizzard in a Teapot

The Associated Press (AP) yesterday ran a rather odd story claiming the National Weather Service (NWS) intentionally kept snow amounts much higher than they thought would actually fall because they thought the public would be "confused" if they lowered amounts?! Here is the key portion of the article:

On Monday, the weather service predicted 18 to 24 inches of snow in New York City. By late Tuesday afternoon, Central Park was covered with a little more than 7 inches of snow with rain and sleet still falling. Other areas, including upstate New York and Connecticut, received more than a foot and a half of snow. Swaths of Pennsylvania were walloped by 20 to 30 inches of snow.

Carbin said a last-minute change downgrading snowfall totals might have given people the wrong message that the storm was no longer a threat. 

It is too bad the Associated Press did not contact AES as our forecasts of this storm were very accurate.

At AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, our forecast for New York (as well as other cities along I-95) was much more accurate than the NWS forecast as reported by AP. This what we forecast at 4pm CDT on Monday:

For New York, we forecast 6 to 12" with the actual amount in Central Park of 7".
For Philadelphia, we forecast 6 to 12" and the amount amount was 8 inches.
And, for Washington, DC, we forecast 3 to 6 inches with an actual amount of 3 inches.

A friend of mine on Facebook (thanks, Andrew!) forwarded a link to Rush Limbaugh's transcript of yesterday's program. With regard to the storm. Rush said,

These guys at the National Weather Service couldn’t even forecast where a blizzard was gonna hit 24 hours out, and it was on the map! We saw the blizzard! And they even gave themselves outs. I looked at AccuWeather.

Thanks, Rush, for noticing our Superior Accuracy™.