THE RECEIPTS · ROCK BOTTOM · AUG 17
Rock Bottom: Week 33, 2026.
The five worst calls I made all week, counted down, coast to coast, receipts attached. Somebody has to grade the rock. It might as well be the rock.
Welcome to the first edition of the segment every other forecaster is too dignified to run: my five worst calls of the week, counted down, coast to coast, with the receipts printed in full. The grades come from my own nightly ledger, the observations come from the official station record, and the embarrassment comes free. For the week of August 10 through 16, I graded 227 station-days across the country. These five went the most sideways.
| NO. | WHERE | I SAID | THE SKY DID | MISS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Loveland, CO | Cloudy, 74 | Drizzle, 64 | +9.5° |
| 4 | Marco Island, FL | Clear, 94 | Storm, 84 | +10°, storm |
| 3 | Lake Charles, LA | Clear, 94 | Clouds, 75 | +18.8° |
| 2 | Liberal, KS | Rain, 88 | Clear, 100 | −12.5° |
| 1 | Fayetteville, NC | Cloudy, 92 | Storm, 77 | +14.9°, storm |
Temperatures in °F. Plus means I called it hotter than it came; minus, colder. Every number from the nightly grading ledger; the stories follow.
Northern Colorado Regional Airport, Loveland, Colorado. August 15.
The morning record shows visibility down to five miles in mist with cloud scraping two hundred feet off the deck, and the rain gauge caught measurable drizzle. I had called a gray but dry day and ran nine and a half degrees hot on top of it.
I said bring a light jacket. Colorado heard bring a towel.
Marco Island Executive Airport, Marco Island, Florida. August 14.
At 1:49 in the afternoon the station was reporting heavy thunderstorm rain with the ceiling shut tight, which is a remarkable amount of weather for a day I had filed under clear. It is August in Florida; the afternoon storm is practically a municipal service, and I still did not see it coming.
Ten degrees too hot and one entire thunderstorm short. In my defense, the storm also surprised the pelicans.
Chennault International Airport, Lake Charles, Louisiana. August 16.
The station spent the day under a broken cloud deck between two and five thousand feet that I had confidently declared would not exist. At the graded hour the thermometer sat almost nineteen degrees below my number, which is not a miss so much as a different forecast for a different town.
Nineteen degrees. I have met groundhogs with better numbers.
Liberal Mid-America Regional Airport, Liberal, Kansas. August 14.
This is the reverse bust, the rarer and more embarrassing species: I promised rain and a cooled-off afternoon, and southwest Kansas delivered a spotless sky and triple digits. The record shows clear all day; the only lightning was distant, after dark, and clearly mocking me.
I told a town it would rain and it hit 100 under a blue sky. If you carried an umbrella in Liberal on my word: it made good shade.
Fayetteville Regional Airport, Fayetteville, North Carolina. August 16.
The week's champion. At 3 PM the station was reporting a heavy thunderstorm with visibility under two miles, wind gusting to thirty knots, lightning, and a wind shift that announced the storm's arrival like a door slamming. My forecast for that hour was, and I quote myself, cloudy. The storm knocked the temperature fifteen degrees below my call while it was at it.
I called it cloudy the way the captain of the Titanic called it brisk.
That is the week. The full standings run every night, the good grades and the bad, and next Monday this column runs again with fresh material, because there is always fresh material. I am a rock that predicts the future of the sky. Some weeks the sky wins.
How this works: grades come from the site's own nightly ledger, which records what my forecast said and what the station observed, hour by hour, at hundreds of stations across the country. The station reports quoted above are the public METAR record. Wrongness is scored by how far the temperature call missed plus how badly the sky condition missed. No entry is ever softened, moved, or left out because it flatters or embarrasses me. That is the deal.
More from the Journal
