Much of Dr. Rose’s time, indeed, is devoted to highly pragmatic and even somewhat banal problems related to how customers interpret his forecasts. For instance: how to develop algorithms that translate raw weather data into everyday verbiage. What does bitterly cold mean? A chance of flurries? Just where is the dividing line between partly cloudy and mostly cloudy? The Weather Channel needs to figure this out, and it needs to establish formal rules for doing so, since it issues far too many forecasts for the verbiage to be determined on an ad hoc basis.
