In Queensland, snow fell in Stanthorpe, Eukey and on the south east border with NSW, but Bureau of Meteorology (Bom) forecaster Gorrdon Banks said the bureau was having trouble measuring it.
(My book, likewise, documents some success stories – both in entire disciplines like meteorology and among individual forecasters within these disciplines – in addition to the various forecasting failures).
Although the request to go higher to avoid bad weather is not an unusual one, pilots are aware that flying over a thunderstorm will not necessarily mean clearing it: according to forecasters at Indonesia's meteorology agency, dense storm clouds were detected up to 44,000ft when the plane was reported to have lost contact.
That interest led her to obtain an MSc in weather, climate and modelling at the University of Reading, followed by a job at the Met Office as a forecaster, specialising in aviation meteorology.
Jason Cordeira, a meteorology professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire and lead forecaster on the CalWater 2015 project, combined statistics from an ensemble of 21 weather models to create an atmospheric river Landfall Tool.
Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology.
After graduating from Pennsylvania State University, Cressman studied meteorology in a military course at New York University, then served as a forecaster with the Army Air Forces.
If so, forecasters say, the storm could become, to use a technical term from meteorology, a whopper.
He worked as a weather forecaster during World War II, leading him to pursue graduate studies in meteorology; he earned master's and doctoral degrees in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943 and 1948.
This makes it difficult to accurately predict weather more than a few days in advance, though weather forecasters are continually working to extend this limit through the scientific study of weather, meteorology.
