As I sit here in this Ames City Council meeting, I’m thinking about today’s “freak storm” and how up in arms we all seem to be about it.  Please allow me to extend this modest proposal—Get. Over. It.

Yes, the weather guys “missed” this storm.  Yes, their forecasts all said the Ames area would get an inch of snow at the most. Yes, at the time of this writing Ames is closing in on no fewer than FIVE inches of wet, heavy snow that’s made clearing my driveway tough and driving even tougher.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is still February in Iowa, right? It snows in February in Iowa, right?

As I understand it, and I’m certainly no meteorologist, but this system took a different track than was modeled. It set up in such a way that sent lots of snow over our area when it was originally supposed to sweep across southeast Iowa.  I know the TV guys like to “wow” us with all their  “Super-Ultra-Mega-Ninja Doppler 9000” technologies, and they like to sell us on the “exactitude” of their forecasting prowess, but let’s all remember what they are really doing is giving us a hypothesis of the weather for any 12, 24, and 36 hour span based on current conditions and models of weather patterns across the nation.  You know what a hypothesis is, right?  It’s an educated guess.

So…the educated guessers were wrong on this one, and we’ve spent the last 10 hours pounding on them rather unmercifully with our clogged snow shovels.  It’s time to be grown-ups and quit picking the low-hanging fruit. As face-punch worthy as the old saw might be, it seems truer now than ever—“don’t like the weather in Iowa, wait five minutes—it’ll change.”  You know what the weather did today?  It changed.