I asked the kids this morning what the weather was like outside, attempting to prepare for the chill of a winter morning. Abby told me that it was supposed to be 50 degrees today, so relatively warm for winter. I mentally questioned this, since it wasn’t all that warm in the house and the heater was running. On my phone, I brought up the weather, and sure enough, the high was meant to reach 50, with a low of 32. But who thought up this absurd way of telling the weather?

Certainly the temperature outside was not necessarily the low. In fact, observing the current temperature at the time, I discovered it to be 37 degrees. I suppose that sometime around 3 or 4 pm the temperature would peak at the 50 the predictions suggested. But would the day be generally warm? Would the higher temperatures linger for longer? And what of the wind chill?

I suggest we take a different tack at telling the temperature. For one, ditch the low/high reporting. It’s an interesting factoid, but only really after the fact. Most people don’t find themselves outdoors at the temperature extremes anyway. Ideally, you’d get a single number that boiled down the temperature for the whole day to something useful and personal, based on your tolerance for temperature extremes; exposure to sun, wind, and rain; and the times of day you were likely to be exposed.

I’d like to switch to metrics, too. The mile markers for temperatures are pretty easy. Room temperature is 20 degrees. Beach weather is 30 degrees. 10 degrees? Better put on a jacket. Not to mention that the rest of the world uses this scale.

Maybe the temperature prediction for the day should include all of the aspects of weather and average it over the time of exposure. Each person’s weather prediction could be slightly different as a result. I think we live in a modern enough society that we could manage this, and could produce a standard now for giving weather predictions in a concise way.

Perhaps the weather prediction could be expressed as a sort number series, including the average temperature, deviation, and some other details that might be important for preparation for exposure. For example, “20/5 Rain”, to indicate an average temperature of 20 degrees centigrade, with a 5 degree deviation, and the presence of rain. Obviously, these types of reports would be useful only to the recipient and only the day of the report - which is when they’re most useful, anyway.