Weather Forecast Fails

Submission 22,632

Part of a series on FAIL / Epic Fail. [View Related Entries]

work in progress

About

Weather Forecast Fails refer to screen captures, GIFs, or videos of weather forecasts that had some sort of unfortunate or humorous mistake or situation. Since most weather forecasting is performed on the local news station in front of a green screen, much of the humor comes from the relative unawareness of the weather forecaster to the joke.

Origin

Weather broadcasting as part of the local news broadcast began after World War II, along with the invention of television. In the late 1970s and early '80s, John Coleman, the first weatherman on ABC-TV's Good Morning America, pioneered the use of on-screen weather satellite information and computer graphics for television forecasts before going on to found the Weather Channel, the first 24-hour weather broadcast network, in 1982.^[1] The use of this technology quickly propagated throughout local broadcasts worldwide, creating many opportunities for fails.

John Coleman at a later weather broadcast position

One of the earliest weather forecast fails was uploaded to eBaum's World on February 26th, 2008, in the style of a Demotivational Poster. The photo they used, which was probably found elsewhere online, features an image screen captured from the weather broadcast of WBNS-10TV, in Columbus Ohio, where the weatherman appears to be gesturing towards a storm which coincidentally looks like a penis]

Spread

Weather forecast fails can be found throughout all image sharing site, especially Reddit and Imgur, where there are hundreds of examples, many of which have independently accrued thousands of views.^[4]^[5] Weather fails can be found in the Failblog community under the "weather" tag.^[6]