Your Five-Day Forecast: More Than Ever Before!

Reported June 2008

BOULDER, Colo. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Odds are you have already watched one weather forecast today and will probably check out a few more. Accurate, timely forecasts are vital to everyday life, but just how critical may surprise you.

Whether at work or play, you probably watch the weather quite closely. Most of us are at the weather person's mercy to know what to wear, what to expect, to prepare for the worst. New research shows the average United States household checks out a weather report more than three times a day.

"It impacts pretty much every part of every activity we are involved with for the most part," Jeff Lazo, the director of the Societal Impacts Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., told Ivanhoe.

To find out how important weather information is to people, meteorologists and economists at NCAR surveyed 1,500 people across the country. "Some people say I don't really actually get it that much, but when you think, you get it from the newspaper in the morning, hear it on the radio driving to and from work, see it on TV a couple of times in the evening," Lazo says.

The findings … most people watch the weather on local TV or cable than listen on radio or look online and in newspapers -- 115 times per month. "When you multiply that then times the whole U.S. population and times twelve months a year, we estimate about three-hundred-billion forecasts a year."

Weather reporting … a whopping $30 billion-a-year business. Fortunately, per person that's less than a dollar a day, but invaluable for most of us. The survey information will be used to support funding the national weather service for congress.

The American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jeff Lazo
Project Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
(303) 497-2857
lazo@ucar.edu

American Meteorological Society
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

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