Dear Rob, I just received this email from a colleague and good friend and I thought I would pass it along to you since you mentioned Salt Lake City weather on the 11 PM news last night.
"Sorry for bombarding your email inbox with emails this morning - I was watching Fox 13's Good Morning Utah just a minute ago, and they read parts of my email to them on air. The meteorologist Damon Yauney also said that they have been receiving "quite a bit of positive feedback for putting their forecasts in Celsius." So, they also added the whole 5-day forecasts in C also." How about bringing us Charlestonians into the 21st century along with the Utah folks, Rob? This is a great opportunity to provide some educational material (which you folks do wonderfully) and start adding metric data to our forecasts. I approach you because I have found that Channel 2 is the leader in this area and what you folks do, others will emulate. After all, we in Charleston like to pride ourselves on being a modern and international city, friendly to people from all lands (i.e., touri$ts). I would like to see, at least in parallel with your current numbers, temperatures in Celsius, pressures in hectopascals , and wind speeds in kilometers per hour. Just picking the current data off the weather banner on my home page here (which you are encouraged to see for yourself via the URL in my signature block) we've got at 1056 this morning: temp 4 �C press 1026 hPa (* see note below) wind 14 km/h out of the ENE vis 16 km Note the proper way to present units please, especially maintaining the space between the numbers and the symbols. Contrary to common beliefs, the raised circle goes after the space in the temperatures since it is part of the symbol. Other common mistakes are not taking care with upper and lower case letters, using "p" instead of "/" (arghh!) in the wind speeds, and using "hr" instead of the proper "h" for hour. You would want to do this correctly, I know, since you have due regard for accuracy. (* Note: The hectopascal is numerically equal to the millibar, but the hectopascal is a modern metric unit, whereas the millibar is not. That pressure could also be presented as 102.6 kPa as they would in Canada, but here in the US, the hectopascal is more popular due to the relationship with the old millibar.) You may feel free to pull the info off my home page on "judging winds" -- what constitutes a breeze, etc. I got those from the federal meteorology handook (FMH-1), as I recall. I would be glad to lend a hand with this if you wish. In fact, you could use that witty ditty on my web page for getting familiar with temperatures in Celsius, which I have taught to kids in grades Kindergarten and up. When those kids see the temperatures in Celsius on your weather segments they will take great delight in "educating" their folks. I did not make that ditty up, by the way; others did. Jim -- James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston 10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street 843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
