Weather or Not

"When people say, 'Is it going to rain tomorrow?' that's not what they mean," Coniglio says. "They mean, 'What time is it going to start raining, when is it going to stop, what time will it rain in Littleton and Thornton, and will I have wet streets when I drive to Lakewood?' Now, we can tell them all that a lot more often than we used to, but we can't always -- and they don't always understand why not."

In retrospect, Coniglio has a pretty good idea why he and his peers booted the March 8 forecast. "It was a really tightly packed front, and the front slipped down further than we expected. It was only about thirty miles off from where we thought it would be; at the same time it was 12 degrees in Cheyenne, it was 50 degrees at Monument Hill [between Denver and Colorado Springs]. But that thirty miles makes the difference between a couple of snowflakes and terrible fog and all the roads icing over."

Adds Nelson, "People often have the mistaken idea that weather is an inexact science, but that's not true. Weather follows all the laws of physics. But it's so complex that we have a difficult time forecasting how a storm is going to move -- and everything can change if there's even a fifty-mile variance on a storm that tracks 3,000 miles across the country. So storms like the one on March 8 happen fairly often; they just don't happen during Friday afternoons in Denver.

"Remember the big Christmas blizzard we had in 1982? Well, there was a storm equally as bad in 1983, but it hit Watkins and Deer Trail out on I-70, so nobody remembers it. Timing is everything."