Do you have a weather nerd in your family?

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I do. My DH. Ok, I admit I get nerding about the weather in the winter because I want a good snowstorm. Call me weird, but I love the snow!!! My DH consults the 4 or 5 different weather/news channels in the morning to make the decision if he is going to ride his motorcylce to work, go crabbing, etc. Usually they are wrong, so why bother. Here is a little bit of information I was reading about today that I thought I would share: Finlay's Secret Storms The world's first tornado expert was a U.S. Army sergeant named John Finlay, who was assigned the job of researching these storms in 1882. The National Weather Service was a brand new agency under the army's Signal Service, and Finlay was to figure out how to predict these mysterious killer storms. By 1887 he had a network of 2,400 volunteers reporting tornadoes, and Finlay's pioneering research was leading to a better understanding of what it takes to make a twister. He was focussing his early prediction efforts on dew-point and winds. Then a curious thing happened. The signal service officials decided that public panic was a bigger threat than tornadoes. At a time when much of the western plains were still being settled, did it occur to the powers-that-be that Finlay's results were not good for real-estate values? In any event, they banned the use of the word "tornado" in forecasts and abolished Finlay's research unit. "Tornado" was officially forbidden until 1938, and it wasn't until the 1950's that the nation's weather service began issuing forecasts for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. --John D. Cox Weather for Dummies, pg. 221