"There aren't other options," he said, speaking on a cordless phone whose batteries were almost dead from constant use. "We don't have any other magic to predict the weather. . . . It is weather. It is not math. It is not an exact science."
This was cold comfort to parents with kids cooped up at home again. "It just was astonishing to wake up and have dry streets and no weather with schools closed on the third snow day in a row," said Margaret Paulsen, a mother of three in Bethesda and part-time lawyer.
The storm left enough behind to give this youngster in Frederick County another day off from school -- and incentive to sled through the snow-covered pines in Myersville.
(Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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With a kindergartner, a preschooler and an infant at home, she was running out of ideas to entertain them. She baked cupcakes, hauled out the Play-Doh, showed videos and cycled neighborhood children through the house. "We're digging deep here," she said.
Shaneena Bitanga spent yesterday caring for her 9-year-old son, a student at the St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, and two children of a friend. The kids were thrilled, but Bitanga's schedule was thrown into disarray. An online sales associate who works from home, she had to postpone a doctor's appointment and put off work until 9 last night.
"It just kind of wears on me," she said. "After three days, they get cabin fever, and they eat you out of house and home."
The weather generated other complications. The Maryland School Assessments for grades 3 through 8 had been scheduled to begin today in Prince George's and Montgomery counties and tomorrow in Howard County. Officials sought and received state permission to postpone the reading and mathematics tests until Thursday.
Many residents reserved much of their unhappiness for TV weather forecasters, charging that they hyped the storm's potential impact Sunday.
Howard University communications professor Paula Matabane, who had to cancel class for the second time in a week, said the flurry of news reports bordered on irresponsibility. "Everybody is watching TV expecting accurate information, and instead they are giving us drama," Matabane said.
Asked if the forecasts were hyped, Topper Shutt, chief meteorologist for WUSA (Channel 9) and at the station since 1988, said the conventions of local TV news sometimes trump accuracy.
"We often can't control what the newsroom does with our information," Shutt said. "If we covered the story, we would probably cover it differently as weather people, but they [the reporters] are looking for a different effect. They say, 'Let's go and jump on something.' "
Off-air meteorologists pointed to other reasons that the forecasts missed the mark.
Henry Margusity of AccuWeather.com said the two main computer models for projecting current weather data into the future could not agree on where the storm would go. One said it would hug the coast and bring more snow; the other had it going out to sea, producing less snow, he said.
"It was a tricky bugger," Margusity said.
The Weather Service began warning of the approach of "the culprit," as one forecaster called it, as early as Friday, according to David Manning, meteorologist at the Sterling office. Special reconnaissance flights monitored its development in the Gulf of Mexico, he said.
By Saturday night, the thinking was that the snow would begin Sunday night but "it should be stressed that a shift in storm track could have large impacts on [precipitation] type and associated amounts," one forecaster wrote. By Sunday night, meteorologist Richard D. Hitchens said the snow would start in Washington about 4 a.m., but he cautioned: "Track is everything."
At 3:49 a.m. yesterday, Woodcock noted that "warm air is getting into the system," and he lowered some predictions from six to 10 inches down to three to six inches.
By the way, one forecaster noted that there's more precipitation headed this way. It's expected by the weekend.
Staff writers David Nakamura, Hamil R. Harris, Nick Anderson, Miranda S. Spivack, Tara Bahrampour, Steven Ginsberg, Maria Glod, Amit R. Paley, Ylan Q. Mui, Joshua Partlow, Eric Weiss and Martin Weil contributed to this report.
