Predicting the weather is easier than it used to be, but not necessarily more accurate. Even with all the new-fangled equipment that meteorologists have at their fingertips, there's still a great deal of uncertainty about what's coming, according to FOX 5 TV weatherman Ken Cook.

"When I say there's a 100 percent chance of rain, does anyone want to guess what that means?" he asked during his talk this week to the Marietta Rotary Club. "OK, that means it is sure to rain. But how much? That forecast doesn't specify. And for how long is it supposed to rain? A half-day? One minute? So that 100 percent forecast is misleading.

"If I can predict a 100 percent chance of rain, all it would have to do is rain .01 inch at some point during the day. And that's a verification. But if that raindrop misses the bucket, that's a 100 percent miss. So we try to stay away from the percents and say there will be rain showers 'scattered across the area.' That's about the best we can do in predicting summer thundershowers. We can do better in the other seasons predicting the time of day it's going to rain. But we're not much better off in knowing which day will be a good rain day than we were when I started in this business about 40 years ago."

That's interesting to know.

Cook graduated from the University of Texas in 1970 with a degree in mathematics, which comes in handy.

"How do math and meteorology come together? In the study of meteorology, it's all calculus, different equations, all the advanced math you can think of," he said.

He's been with FOX 5 since 1979 and is Atlanta's longest-tenured weatherman.

The computer modeling that modern weathermen use for their forecasts is much better than back then, no surprise.

"The graphics are wonderful," he added. "The great thing from the meteorology standpoint is that we can show you on television what we can see in our office. It used to be sort of a cloudy secret till weather radar hit the air in about 1986 with Guy Sharpe, my predecessor at FOX 5. For the first time you could see on the air what a meteorologist could see in his office. You could see where those showers are. I've always felt that the more tools we have, the better we can inform you of what's going on out there.

So where is the new technology taking us, weather-wise?

"We will see more true representations on radar of shower clouds.?It is still kind of crude now," he said. "The other big change will be with dual phase radar. Now radar is like a flashlight beam. You get a reflection off it. Dual phase will shoot a broader beam both horizontally and vertically and go all around and will give better 3-D views of developing tornadoes in the clouds."

Even so, such radar will lose some of its effectiveness for areas 40 or 50 miles from the radar source. Due to the curvature of the earth, the radar at that distance can only see what's in the clouds from 5,000 feet on up.

"That's important because a few years ago there was an early morning tornado in Gainesville at 6 a.m., a time when we would not suspect severe tornadic weather, and they really did not see it. And it was a strong F2 or F3 tornado. It could have been F4. And all the radar saw was the weaker circulation above 10,000 feet," he said.

Incidentally, the false alarm rate for tornado warnings is 90 percent," Cook said.

"We don't know which ones they are. We have Doppler, and weather service radar, and we see things."

What about global warming? Don't worry about it, Cook suggested.

"Global warming seems to be on people's minds day and day out, but I'm not a big proponent of it," he said. "The more I read about it, the more evidence I see that it's really not happening. And as a matter of fact, the temperature has begun to lower since about 1998. So those who do support it say, 'It's just taking some time off, just wait another 20 or 30 years and it will hit us again.'"

"That's probably true because over the last century or two we've seen cycles of about 20 or 30 years where it goes up and down and up and down. And those who are my age remember that back in the 1970 there was this frenzy that another Ice Age was going to happen by 2000 and there were certainly going to be dire consequences. The U.S. population and world population were going to be way, way down from where they were in 1970 and obviously, that did not happen.

"So, I would not worry about global warming. In a world of problems there are lots of things that are much, much more important to us individually and as a society than global warming."

That's reassuring.

Cook said the job of a TV weatherman is to try and remove the veils and curtains from forecasting and "just show it."

"You can think I'm full of it if you want to. But summertime forecasting is frustrating to us. Because as I say to myself all the time off camera, the weather has a mind of its own, and the weather is going to do what the weather's going to do."

So better carry an umbrella, just in case.

Bill Kinney is associate editor of The Marietta Daily Journal.