Tyler's Weather

This winter continues to be on track to make it’s mark in the record books! Not in a snowy fashion, but with warm temperatures and little snow. Remember, it was just this past January that all kinds of snowy records were smashed. Now, we have a depressing lack of snow in New England. Ski areas are struggling to open large amounts of new terrain and snowmaking systems are being forced to show their true colors. The new year will bring a close to December; at which point, we can look back and quantitatively determine how much below average we were in the snowfall department and how much above average we were in terms of temperatures.

Until then, enjoy these photos from Cabot, Vermont. I’m up here visiting family. Normally, winter visits feature a good amount of snowmobiling. This year, especially after last night’s rain storm, adequate snow is hard to find. Grass dominates the fields that normally lie under snow drifts that are several feet high. Tonight, I ran into a pleasant surprise while in town! A moderate snow shower was blanketing the road. Thank the northwest wind and the Green Mountains!

On Thursday afternoon, Connecticut Light and Power took their outage map offline for approximately 30 minutes. When it came back online, much of it looked to be the same. Most probably figured the map had an issue that needed to be repaired. But to those who looked closely, the color scale had changed.

CL&P Tweet

CL&P issued a tweet shortly thereafter to say the map had come back online – and that more detail had been incorporated into the map’s color scale.

CL&P Tweet

But was it wise to change the color scale on the power outage map during this major disaster? This change is confusing. It added more colors to an already cluttered map. I know, you could’ve simply looked at the table of outage numbers and seen that little had changed in the 30 minute time span – literally. But, most of the blacks, indicative of towns that had 81%-100% of customers without power, disappeared. Now, only towns meeting a stricter criteria are shaded with black. Your town must have 91%-100% of customers without power to be shaded black. This wiped most of the black off of the map. Good, right? Well, it gives a false impression to those who constantly check the map for progress without looking at the actual numbers or scale each time they visit the site.

Perhaps it would have been wise to add more detail before the storm hit.

Greetings from Cabot!

Outages Continue; CL&P Changes Map Colors