Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting look at the challenging task of accurately predicting the weather, which local meteorologists are tasked with every day. The article reports 9 out of 10 Americans seek out the forecast — usually more than three times a day — and even the most experienced weathercasters are held accountable if the weather is reported incorrectly:

Weatherman Jay Trobec has been giving the forecast to 90,000 viewers of his Sioux Falls, S.D., TV station for 14 years, and he is usually right. But “if I blow a forecast, I hear about it,” he says.

When he predicted six inches of snow in Sioux Falls that never arrived, “people were coming up to me in the coffee shop and berating me,” says Dr. Trobec, chief meteorologist at KELO-TV. “People who lay concrete for a living, people who put roofs on houses, don’t like it when the forecast isn’t correct.”

Read the full article here, and check out a few reporting tips from seasoned meteorologists here.