How Seattle's weather wonks sparked a Northwest tempest in a teapot

Even in this era of Real Housewives and celebrity boxing on Netflix, you haven’t seen a real fight until you’ve watched weather nerds battling over a botched forecast.

Take the Christmas Eve Windstorm That Never Happened.

Most of us in Western Washington were glad the gale-force winds predicted for Dec. 24 didn’t show up.

Not so the folks who spend hours studying, tracking and arguing about the weather.

When the storm didn’t arrive, some took to social media to criticize the National Weather Service for overstating the wind risks of a low-pressure system coming up from California.

But the real cage match occurred in the weather blogosphere itself, where experts of varying pedigrees excoriated each other's forecasting skills.

“It just got into this nasty shouting match,” Justin Shaw, a marketing writer who moonlights as Seattle Weather Blog on X, and was “raked over the coals” for being skeptical of the weather service’s wind warning. “One of the worst social media experiences I’ve had.”

Weather wonks weren't the only ones complaining. The episode also underscored growing tensions around the way some enthusiasts are using extreme forecasts to win followers and influence, even at the expense of accuracy.

“Y’all are grifters anyways, griped one X poster, summing up the mood online after the nonwindstorm. "Chasing hype to get clicks."

'The amateurs get money'

Predictably, perhaps, near the center of this tempest in an online teapot was Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and a human high-pressure system of the Northwest weather blogosphere.

Mass was sharply critical of the weather service’s wind forecast. He said the agency’s forecasting skills have deteriorated and are now inferior to those of European Union, British and Canadian weather agencies, and even some private forecasters.

"The Weather Channel forecast on your phone is better than the National Weather Service forecast," Mass said in an interview late last month.

But Mass also took aim at the way the erroneous Christmas Eve wind forecast was “amplified by the traditional media and further hyped by social media ‘influencers’ and local weather enthusiasts, few of whom have degrees in meteorology,” as he posted after the nonstorm.

That got an angry reaction from said influencers and enthusiasts, much of it focused on Mass’ own forecasting foibles, which they said included recent misses on snowfall and on power outages from a Dec. 16 windstorm.

“After the month of poor forecasting you just had … you lecturing others about missing an event certainly is a choice,” posted Michael Snyder, an Alaska Airlines aircraft dispatcher who hosts the widely viewed Pacific Northwest Weather Watch on YouTube.

“Mr. Mass, I don't appreciate you going out of your way to diss me and many others … when you have made the same mistakes as well,” added Whidbey Island photographer and self-described "weather forecaster" and storm chaser Jonathan Pulley, in a post on X.

Mass is unapologetic.

Some weather influencers have “thousands of people following them” and have financial incentives to hype the worst-case scenarios, Mass said in the interview. "A lot of them get revenue, depending on hit rates," he said. "The amateurs get money."

Mass, it should be said, also has a large social media presence and a high hit rate. His Dec. 29 after-action critique got 200,000 views, he said, which was "huge — one of the biggest hit rates I've ever had."

These aren't new problems, exactly.

Weather forecasting has always struggled to balance the public’s eagerness for weather information with the limits of a science based on probabilities.

Today's increasingly powerful forecast models generate a range of potential scenarios and even tiny changes in initial conditions can mean dramatically different outcomes.

But the online world makes it all more complicated.

With growing access to weather data, maps and forecasting models, pretty much anyone can post detailed, professional-looking weather forecasts.

And with rising distrust in government and traditional media, the public is often eager for alternative sources.

That hunger “has opened the door for weather ‘influencers’ on TikTok or on other social media platforms,” said Kelli Burns, a University of South Florida associate professor who studies influencers.

It has also created openings for intentional chaos, via weather “trolls" looking to "sow that distrust … in the weather reports and the institutions,” often by claiming that any forecast is “all hype,” Burns said.

The result is a noisy, competitive environment where players often find themselves “hyping weather stories for ratings or clicks,” Burns said. “And the more extreme something is, the more likely it is to go viral.”

'A risk-management decision'

That dynamic was clearly in play during the Christmas Eve wind forecast.

The stage was set days earlier, as various forecasting agencies, including the National Weather Service, began discussing a low-pressure area off California.

Low-pressure areas act like vacuums, accelerating surrounding air. If the California system were to track up the coast to Puget Sound, it could generate powerful winds just in time for Christmas Eve.

With soils in Western Washington saturated from weeks of rain, leaving trees less stable, there was potential for widespread power outages.

But like all forecasts, this prediction came with major caveats — among them, that if the low-pressure system tracked inland instead, it would weaken.

On Tuesday, Dec. 23, the weather service itself noted that "the wind forecast for Wednesday remains highly uncertain," with predictions for Seattle-area wind gusts ranging from 67 mph all the way down to 12 mph.

In fact, a day earlier, the highly respected European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts was predicting an inland track and weaker wind.

By then, however, some weather enthusiasts were already emphasizing the worst case.

"Uh oh … The high-end scenario is looking more and more likely," posted Pulley, aka WhidbeyWXGuy, around 5 p.m. Dec. 23. A few hours later, he added, "Our storm is starting to develop a closed center. It now looks like a full-fledged cyclone the size of California."

Then, to the surprise of some, the weather service also went with the high-end scenario.

Around 8 p.m. Dec. 23, the agency issued a high-wind warning for much of the Western Washington lowlands, with gusts of 50 mph to 60 mph, and expectations for "widespread power outages."

Later, agency officials said that warning was justified by the “data available to NWS meteorologists” through early Dec. 24, but also by the additional danger from saturated soils.

"This is a risk-management decision, balancing the probability of an event with the impact level that event would have on the region," Reid Wolcott, warning coordination meteorologist at the service's Seattle office, said in an emailed statement.

The high-wind warning "reflected a 'protective' stance — ensuring the public was prepared for the higher end of the risk spectrum rather than being caught off guard during a major holiday," Wolcott added.

Not everyone was buying the weather service's logic.

Late on Dec. 23, Mass posted a prediction for much lower winds, and later described the agency's high-wind warning as "gambling on a low-probability solution." A few bloggers, like Seattle Weather Blog's Shaw, also posted their doubts.

By then, however, the weather blogosphere, now fueled by the high-wind warning, was going full-tilt for a major, destructive storm.

Mass said he got “a few dozen emails” unhappy over his skeptical take. Shaw was hammered for being too quick to stand down.

“You're a weather blog and instead of warning people to prepare just in case, you're saying nothing gonna happen, no big deal," said one commenter on X. "Very irresponsible."

“We’ll know more tomorrow but to make a statement like that is highly inaccurate,” said another.

After the weather service downgraded and then canceled the wind warning, Dec. 24, the online discourse shifted into a recriminatory phase, which peaked with Mass' Dec. 29 blog chiding the nonexperts.

Kings of the weather

Weeks later, some weather bloggers say the drama partly reflects an ego-fueled competition among amateurs and experts "to establish themselves as the King of Weather,” said Shaw.

Snyder, the Pacific Northwest Weather Watch YouTuber, says his disagreements with Mass didn't get serious until 2021, when he started his YouTube channel, which now has 109,000 subscribers.

“That's when Cliff really started coming after me, when I started getting a big following,” Snyder said.

Mass is unrepentant. He insists he never targets enthusiasts by name, but is nonetheless compelled to call out their shoddy work. "There's a moral and ethical issue here, about people who really don't have the expertise, putting out this kind of information.”

Mass rejects the amateurs' criticism of his own work — "My forecasts were highly accurate" — but declines to get into specific claims. “You know what they say about getting in the mud with a pig.”

As for the future of our weather drama, the forecast is, well, cloudy.

Mass, for one, thinks a big part of the problem is the weather service, which is "not producing state-of-the-science forecasts anymore," and needs to be completely revamped.

In its statement, the weather service said its main forecasting model "continues to be a leading weather forecast model in the field," but added that the agency is working to improve its forecasting, including with artificial intelligence.

The forecast for the weather blogosphere is also mixed.

Burns, the expert on influencers, feels nonexperts could gradually lose power because "lot of people are starting to turn away from social media just for their mental health."

The weather enthusiasts aren't so sure. Consumers will always be interested in the weather, which means there will always be experts, actual and self-styled, competing for their views and clicks.

"Everybody just wants to be the first to say something, or the first to get the most attention," said Snyder, the YouTuber. "It just comes with the territory."

Shaw agrees. But as someone who became a weather nerd after the Inauguration Day windstorm of 1993, he also misses the gentler discourse that surrounded forecasts, and forecasters, in those predigital days.

He points to the late Steve Pool, who was KOMO-TV's weather guy for decades, starting in the 1980s.

"I can't imagine Steve Pool getting into this back and forth with other Seattle citizens," he said, laughing. "I guess it's just a different era now.