By Scott Kirsner
Boston Globe
December 20, 2004

It was a moment straight out of ''Broadcast News."

Barry Burbank had just finished delivering a short summary of the day's weather at the start of the noon newscast last Wednesday on Channel 4. There had been some overnight snow squalls on Cape Cod -- five inches had fallen in Provincetown -- but Burbank wasn't expecting much additional accumulation. In Boston, it was a frigid, blue-sky day, and the bigger story, Burbank said, was a big storm moving in for Sunday or today.

Barely two minutes after Burbank had gone off the air, executive producer Pam Steffey swung through the glass door of Channel 4's weather department.

''Have you guys seen Channel 7?" she asked. They had sent a reporter to the Cape to report live on a couple of traffic accidents caused by the snow. Burbank and weather producer Terry Eliasen protested that it wasn't a major storm. ''I'm sure it's not a blizzard. It just looks really good on video," Steffey said. ''I think we were asleep at the wheel."

Winter weather gets the competitive juices flowing at Boston TV stations, and while part of the competition hinges on news judgment -- such as whether to dispatch a reporter to stand in the snow -- stations also look to technology to gain an edge. They're erecting million-dollar Doppler towers and investing in sophisticated on-air graphics, all in the hopes of doing a better job than their rivals at telling viewers when the rain-snow line is about to dip south of Newburyport.

''Research consistently shows that the number one reason people tune in to local news is weather," says Linda Maynard, vice president of marketing at WSI Corp. in Andover, which supplies weather data to TV stations around the country.

''It makes perfect sense, because weather affects everyone."

WSI produces the TrueView graphics package used by many stations, which shows waves lapping at the shore on windy days and clouds massing overhead when the forecast is mostly cloudy.

A technological arms race is underway in the Boston television market, with Channel 4 and Channel 5 leading the buildup.

''Our Doppler radar in Worcester puts out 1 million watts," boasts Eliasen at Channel 4. ''It can see storms behind storms." At Channel 5, meteorologist Harvey Leonard emphasizes that the station has been using its Doppler radar for three years now -- Channel 4 installed its system only last year -- and says his station's Doppler tower is in a better location, in Hopkinton. (Doppler radar sends out radio waves, which when they reflect off water in the air, can determine wind direction and wind speed within a storm, based on how the frequency of the radio waves changes.)

The US government also maintains its own network of Doppler radar stations around the country, including one in Taunton and one in Gray, Maine. And some stations, like Channel 7 and New England Cable News, choose to get their radar information from that network, often by way of WSI.

''I think what you're seeing here is a station that is number three in the ratings, and continues to be number three, spending their money on Doppler," says Ed Kosowski, news director at Channel 7, referring to Channel 4 and its heavily marketed ''First Alert" Doppler radar. ''Does it really make their weather presentation better? I don't think so."

In the November ratings, Channel 7 had the most-watched 11 p.m. newscast; Channel 5 won in the early evening hours and in the early morning.

While the intense promotion of Channel 4's ''First Alert" Doppler and Channel 5's ''StormTrak 5 Live Doppler" has managed to convince viewers that Doppler radar is somehow essential to producing accurate weather forecasts, it's actually not involved at all in the stuff viewers truly care about: the kind of long-range forecasting that tells you whether Saturday and Sunday will be wet or dry. Doppler imagery is only useful for tracking the weather of the next few hours.

''Doppler rises in importance when you're interpreting a fast-breaking storm," says Frederick Gadomski, a meteorology professor at Penn State and a native of New Bedford. ''But the extent that it contributes over 365 days is actually quite small -- much smaller than its prominence in the stations' advertising," Gadomski says.

And those million-dollar Doppler towers are useless when it comes to telling the story of a lingering deep freeze in February, or a blistering heat wave in August, since extreme cold and hot don't show up on radar.

When it comes to longer-term prognostications, all of Boston's TV meteorologists rely on the same set of forecast models that are churned out by government supercomputers: charts of enigmatic numbers, and US maps that look as though they were painted by Peter Max. (They're available at www.nws.noaa.gov.)

Burbank, Leonard, and Todd Gross at Channel 7 all evaluate the same models, produced by the US, Canadian, and British governments, and try to figure out which ones seem the most plausible.

''We also look at new models coming out and try to figure out whether they seem reliable enough," says Dick Albert at Channel 5. ''You can't go hook, line, and sinker for it just because it's new."

Forecasting New England Weather isn't easy, says Albert, who has also worked in San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Denver. Experience counts for a lot -- the ability to study the latest models fresh off the laser printer and determine whether a storm front will bring rain, snow, the ever-popular ''wintry mix," or just dark clouds.

Meteorologists still make a lot of judgment calls, once they've sifted through all the data.

''There's strong competitiveness between all of us," says Gross, ''but to say that I respect the knowledge and forecast expertise of some of the individuals at the other stations would be an understatement. We're talking about the cream of the crop in Boston."

But when a rampaging blizzard fizzles out before it reaches Boston, or when one inch of snow suddenly becomes six, the cream of the crop hears about it from their viewers. Every local meteorologist, it seems, is regularly harangued about the missed calls.

''People are very bold with their e-mails," says meteorologist Ed Carroll of Channel 4. ''The most common is, 'Do you guys ever look out the window?' "