“Sometimes the need to adapt the forecast to the consumer can take on comical dimensions. For many years, the Weather Channel had indicated rain on their radar maps with green shading (occasionally accompanied by yellow and red for severe storms). At some point in 2001, someone in the marketing department got the bright idea to make rain blue instead—which is, after all, what we think of as the color of water. The Weather Channel was quickly besieged with phone calls from outraged—and occasionally terrified—consumers, some of whom mistook the blue blotches for some kind of heretofore unknown precipitation (plasma storms? radioactive fallout?). “That was a nuclear meltdown,” Dr. Rose told me. “Somebody wrote in and said, ‘For years you’ve been telling us that rain is green—and now it’s blue? What madness is this?”