Central Coast News KION/KCBAQ: Why Are Chualar's Temperatures Different From Nearby Cities?

Q: Why Are Chualar's Temperatures Different From Nearby Cities?

A: Daniel from Salinas asked, "Chualar's temperature is also listed in the newspapers to be about 10 degrees warmer than that of Gonzalez. Is this true, and why?"

Here is Chief Meteorologist Norm Hoffmann:

Thank you for your question. The quick answer is that at least in the summer Chualar is generally 3 to 5 degrees cooler than Gonzales because it is 10 miles closer to the ocean than Gonzales. Just as Salinas is cooler than Gonzales because it is closer to the cooler ocean. That is not the case in the winter, but it certainly is in the summer months.

Why do they do this? Most newspapers contract out their weather pages. In other words they do not have someone locally who does the Forecast temperatures and weather for them. In most cases it is more economical for them to contract the weather page to a company who does hundreds if not thousands of pages a day. This means that the Meteorologists who do the weather page for the newspapers are probably not from the Central Coast. Mostly they are done automatically on a computer rather than someone just entering all the numbers on a page.

In fact if the Meteorologists are from a company called AccuWeather (which does a lot of weather pages for newspapers around the country) they are located back East. Check on the weather page and you will probably find in small print somewhere who does the page. I went to their web site and AccuWeather is the company who does their weather page on the web, so I would suspect they also do the weather page for the newspaper as well.

I would suggest to you that AccuWeather may have Chualar in the wrong place in their computer program, thus making it warmer than Gonzales. So, your best bet is to write, email or call the Californian and inform them of the discrepancy and see if they call AccuWeather to correct the problem. It seems to me it would be an easy computer programming fix.

I hope that helps and thanks for asking.

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