Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Seattle television weathercaster Steve Pool picked a bad day to sign copies of his new book, ``Somewhere I Was Right.'' The sky was cloudless. Pool had forecast showers.

``Where were you right?'' demanded Judy Sawall, passing by Pool's table Nov. 26 at a Costco Wholesale Corp. store. Maurice Robkin, 74, a retired University of Washington professor, quizzed Pool on the mathematics in his forecast models. Jeff Brown wanted to know what happened back in 1996, when he lived in Yakima, Washington, and got 18 inches (46 centimeters) of unexpected snow.

As ski season gets under way in the Pacific Northwest, so has another local sport: Poking fun at the frequent misses of the region's weathercasters. A hilly, complex terrain makes for extreme variations. Forecasting is made tougher by a lack of well- situated coastal radars, which would allow meteorologists to peer inside storms approaching from the Pacific Ocean.

``We have the worst coastal radar coverage of any place in the continental United States,'' says Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. ``That results in our occasional major forecast busts, where the forecasts are completely wrong a day in advance.''

One such bust came in the ``South Valley Surprise'' of Feb. 7, 2002, when 85 mile-per-hour (140 kilometer-per-hour) winds gusted in off the Oregon coast and damaged homes and businesses. Satellites and a few scattered ocean buoys didn't provide enough data to locate the low-pressure system, according to Mass.

The unreliability of forecasts hasn't diminished the local appetite for news about weather.

`Stormtracker'

Cox Enterprises Inc.'s KIRO-TV in August introduced ``Stormtracker,'' a radar map that displays an exact time when storms might reach individual neighborhoods. This month KIRO chief meteorologist Andy Wappler began recording a daily podcast for the Web, a two-minute weather ``chalk talk'' that can be downloaded onto Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod audio players.

The University of Washington gets as many as 500,000 hits a day on the Web site of its MM5 forecasting system, which the university says is the first in the world that can predict weather on a scale of a few thousand yards.

``I'm a total weather junkie,'' says Bob Kruger, an environmental scientist for King County, who says he checks the weather about 10 times a day, usually at the university's site or the National Weather Service Web site.

`Predictably Unpredictable'

The book by Pool and Scott Sistek, both weather forecasters for Fisher Communications Inc.'s KOMO-TV, taps into the local fascination. The book, published this year by Seattle-based Classic Day/Peanut Butter Publishing, is subtitled ``Why Northwest Weather Is So Predictably Unpredictable.''

``It's a 200-page excuse,'' says Pool, 52. ``Between playing golf and doing the weather, I have no problem being humble.''

The book explains some of the peculiarities of Northwest weather, starting with the convergence zone, an area of competing air currents. When Pacific winds hit the Olympic Mountains west of Seattle, they split and bend, like water flowing around a rock in a stream. That results in rain showers of varying intensity along the zone, usually just north of Seattle. A few miles away there may be sun.

The vagaries of the zone are one reason Pool hedged his forecast for showers Nov. 26 with a term unique to the region: sunbreaks, meaning periods of sun on an otherwise gray day.

`Huge Terrain Variations'

``If you're forecasting in Kansas, you can pretty much say it's going to be 90 degrees with a 100 percent chance of thunderstorms and have a 100 percent chance of being right,'' says KIRO's Wappler, 40, who succeeded his father, Harry, as chief meteorologist. ``Here we have such huge terrain variations.''

The station makes the weather a top news priority. Standing on the weather set, Wappler shows off three cameras dedicated to his three-minute reports. In surveys, 90 percent of viewers cite weather as the No. 1 reason they watch the news, he says. The Seattle area's 2 inches (5 centimeters) of snow Nov. 29 was KIRO's top story.

Pouring martinis at a nearly empty downtown bar called Von's that day, waiter Jason Trinkle says he's tired of saturation weather coverage. ``That's why no one is here -- Stormwatch 2005,'' says Trinkle, 34.

People complain about hype until their own house is buried in snow, Wappler replies. He says the quality of forecasts has improved since the National Weather Service introduced more-modern radar stations over the past decade.

New Radar Stations

Three new stations are in Washington and Oregon. The University of Washington's Mass says they are too far inland and blocked by too many mountains to be useful in gathering data on Pacific storms. He is lobbying the federal government to install two more radars, at a cost of $4.5 million apiece.

``Once we attack that problem, we will have some of the most accurate weather forecasting in the world,'' he says.

For now, Wappler admits there is as much art as science in his predictions. Behind a flat-screen computer display, he keeps a dog-eared logbook started by his father in 1983 where he jots down the day's weather.

``It still comes down to your intuition and memory,'' he says.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Robison in Seattle on robison@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 1, 2005 07:28 EST