Notes From My Knapsack 8-13-06
Jeff Gill

Colors of Panic, or Spectrum of Silliness?

Surely it is not just me. I don’t even know what the Homeland Security threat level is right now, but I suspect it is best when green or something of the sort. Probably mauve or puce today.
No, those aren’t the colors of emergency and warning I’m puzzled about, but the little sequence and significance of light green, dark green, yellow, red, pink, white.
Those are, of course, the stages of rain intensity on weather radar, and even the Little Guy knows their import. I’ve been looking at these colors at least since cable and The Weather Channel entered our lives, which co-incidentally coincided with a point in my life when I was walking a mile-plus to work (and across a long bridge over a river at that).
What I know about weather radar can be put in…well, about anything small, because I know nothing about reflected radio waves other than the colors. But I have extensive personal direct experience, as do many of us, in watching our network local or national cable radar picture, and then walking out and spending a stretch under those pictures.
What I’ve known for years, I thought, was this: light speckled green meant rain that may not even hit the ground, solid light green mist or light rain, dark green pavement wetting precipitation, red hard rain, and yellow on up torrents with the stray flying poodle coming out of the sky.
Now, here’s my question. Did everyone decide this spring to shift the settings down one full notch on the color bar? Is the sensitivity switch set on high? Did the fiddling from the unmistakable winter hysteria-mongering stick, and carry over into warm weather?
Because apparently, scattered green is always dry pavement (verga or somesuch), light green usually ditto, dark solid green is still often pitter-pats and mostly dots on the concrete, with steady rain not showing up until you have red on the screen, which was formerly cats n’ dogs territory.
This is certainly not a major issue, but it is a sudden and significant shift in my mind. Those tints and the expectations we carry with them have held steady for a very long time, and they all (from my vantage) have made a sudden, distinct jump to overstating the obvious. What happened?
Did a station manager somewhere get cranky because the radar didn’t look cool enough often enough, and said "can’t you guys tweak this thing up a bit?" I have been noticing for the last couple years a tendency to cover yesterday’s storms well past their sell-by date ("here’s where the storm yesterday went a hundred miles away") or pump up tomorrow’s ("our projected track takes it along this possible course") to the exclusion of telling us much about the next 24 hours, unless there’s a colorful blob in the offing right now. The end result is that there’s always some yellow and red to point at excitedly.
Or if there’s nothing from the last two days or coming in three, we’re likely to get all wound up about the heat index. Enough on that for now.
The fact of the matter is that information is losing out to agitation on many fronts, and I just didn’t expect that trend to extend to the radar picture. Fear sells better than security and confidence, and anger trumps happiness in the marketplace. If you’re worried about rain, you’re a potential customer, and the world always needs more customers. So tweaked it must be, and I’ll just keep mowing the lawn right through green patches of radar, without a dot on the pavement.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; offer your radar views at knapsack77@gmail.com.