Nowcasting meets Stratocasting

I was just skimming through the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and I was struck my this word: Nowcasting. I've seen it before but hadn't really focused on it. Nowcasting, as I understand it, is weather forecasting that is very near term -- just hours and minutes before the weather hits you. This is a realm of forecasting where human judgment, not computer models, still rules. That's because the scale of weather very close to the here and now is extremely specific and detailed. It's the difference between "A chance of showers" and  "Honey, where'd you stow the lifevests?" It's just not economical to make computers look that closely, so weatherpersons have to fill this in on their own using what they know about local conditions.

Here's the fun part: Anyone who watches the sky and monitors the local Doppler radar online is a sort of nowcaster. So even I'm a nowcaster (which is really cool, because it's the closest I'll ever get to being a forecaster).

Take care, however, not to confuse a nowcaster with a thencaster. That's a person who reminisces about weather. Like those fogies who say things like "This is nothing like the drought breaker monsoon of '89, when electrified toads dropped from green thunderheads...." For what it's worth, I consider myself a nowcaster and a thencaster.

One more word of advice: If you too are a now and/or thencaster, avoid specializing too much. You may quickly find yourself wandering into foreign lands of language and culture. A nowcaster who is particularly good at watching stratus clouds might be tempted to call himself a stratocaster, which is a kind of electric guitar. This could lead to some confusion.

Stratus cloud photo by Jeffrey Lew, copyright University Corporation for Atmospheric Research