Over on the top of the right-hand column of this blog you’ll find a link to a website where you can see the local weather forecast for Tübingen. 

I think the site is kind of cute with their use of little symbols for the weather:

Screenshot of a website that lists the weather for Tübingen

There are icons for sunny, cloudy, partly cloudy, just as there are on many other sites, but this site also has one for fog (on the top left in the screenshot above) which I’d not seen used before. Plus, they divide up the day’s forecast into four parts, which is also helpful for a language-learner like me to be reminded of the words for Morning, Midday, Afternoon, and Nighttime over and over when I check the weather in the morning before I head out.

Plus, this site also puts a little picture up with a closed or open umbrella, to indicate the likelihood and/or the accumulation of rain.  I actually don’t know if the closed umbrella means only that it’s not supposed to rain, or if is supposed to mean that it could rain, but only ever so slightly, so that you wouldn’t need to open your umbrella for it. The latter situation was always a distinct possibility in Vancouver, where we lived for several years. In Vancouver, most of the year there is the possibility of rain, but often the rain was so light you wouldn’t bother using an umbrella.

All in all, the website is cute, nicely laid out, and even easy to understand if you don’t speak German, I think. Much better in those regards than some weather sites I’ve looked at for the U.S. and Italy.  There’s even a place right at the top of the page where it lists the up-to-the-minute current weather conditions, labelled Das aktuelle Wetter.  So, the other morning, as I looked out of the window and saw even fog practically all the way up to our door here at the top of the 59 steps, I asked Chris to check the forecast to see if it was supposed to be rainy and cold all day. Chris checked the weather site and told me that according the official weather report,  the actual weather at that moment was “Sunny”. 

Umm, not even close, actually.

Ah well, clearly, they aren’t any better at predicting the weather here than they are predicting it anywhere else in the world. I’ve often speculated that it must be a great job to be a weather forecaster, since no one expects you to be accurate most of the time. If you happen to guess correctly when predicting the weather some of the time, you’ll be hailed as a genius.  If you happen to guess wrong, well, people don’t expect you to get it right anyway, so they will just shrug off the fact that you predicted sun, and it later turns out to be a blizzard. The funny thing to me is that most of us still  check the weather forecast almost every day, making decisions to take that umbrella — or not — based on what the forecast says. Even though we know it’s likely to be anybody’s guess if the forecast will be correct. Creatures of habit are strange beasts, I guess.

On a related “they don’t seem to know how to predict” topic, by now I’m sure you’ve read or heard about all the wildly wrong guesses the NASA scientists made about where and when that satellite was going to land this past weekend when it crashed to earth.  My favorite “prediction” was a quote I read from an astrophysicist working at NASA,  who said something like, “Well, it will probably land in an ocean, because there’s a lot of ocean out there.” Gee, really? Glad an astrophysicist  was able to figure that one out for us.  Sheesh.

On the other hand,  I think that guy could have a career in weather forecasting if that astrophysics gig doesn’t work out. He at least seems to be able to note the obvious, after all.  In that sense, he might even be better than the weather forecasters for that Tübingen website, who clearly didn’t even bother to look out of the window the other day to notice that you couldn’t spot the sun for all the fog. 😉