This letter is in response to the Wednesday, March 4 critique of the Campus Weather Service’s Weather Page.
The Daily Collegian receives the Weather Page from the Penn State Department of Meteorology volunteer organization, the Campus Weather Service (CWS). The Department of Meteorology is considered to have the best programs in the country and is known for being academically rigorous. The New York Times entrusts its full-page weather spread to the Communications Group in the Department of Meteorology. Also, the Department houses the Pennsylvania State Climatology Office.
One of the CWS’s five branches focuses solely on producing the forecast for The Daily Collegian. Teams of five to ten student meteorologists work approximately two hours each night, Sunday to Thursday, to generate an accurate, free product for The Daily Collegian newspaper. The final product provides students at the University Park Campus with a four-day outlook, a forecast discussion, and almanac/climate information.
Over the past several years, the editors of The Daily Collegian have drastically cut the Weather Page removing sections like the Special Weather Feature. On numerous occasions, The Daily Collegian has printed the wrong forecast, changed the graphics, or given credit to the wrong shift members.
On Wednesday, Collegian editors and managers removed Saturday’s forecast, chopped off the last few sentences of the forecast discussion, and removed the names of the individuals who created the product as a means to make room for more news stories on the page.
Sadly, The Daily Collegian is removing information from the most accurate forecast in the State College area. The shift managers and vice-president of The Daily Collegian branch of the CWS have maintained statistics on forecasts generated by each shift, and compared the forecasts against the numerical weather prediction models and professional service providers. Through the statistics, the branch has found that the CWS forecast is consistently the most accurate in Happy Valley. This accuracy stems from the fact that CWS focuses on one location and not the entire nation. The professional service providers cannot devote the resources to a site-specific forecast.
I hope that the editors of The Daily Collegian will reconsider before they criticize members of the Campus Weather Service in the future.
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3 comments:
Maybe they aren't familiar with the saying, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you..."
Can you post the article or a link to it?
I have a copy of the weather page that is being critiqued, and I'll upload it once I get access to a scanner during Spring Break.
As the shift manager of that forecast, and a nominee to become the head of the entire Collegian branch of the CWS in the upcoming elections, it really upsets me every time they cut parts of our forecasts. They obviously have very little respect for the outstanding jobs that we do. I plan to create a better relationship with the Collegian so that unfortunate events like this can be avoided in the future.
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