Météo France

As the weather has turned colder, we've taken more interest in weather reports. Will it rain today? (Usually, the answer is yes.) Should we wear ugly American winter coats perfect for Boston-like temperatures, or stay stylish (and a little colder) with the black midweight coats that seem to be the uniform in Paris? (Forget assimilation: when I take Panda out in the morning and it's 25 degrees, I want my ugly Columbia ski jacket.)

We tend to get our weather reports from two different places: the French equivalent of weather.com, http://france.meteofrance.com/; and tv weather reports we watch streaming online.

Météo France has the advantage of showing us exactly what's going on in Paris, arrondissement by arrondissement, while the tv weather reports give the whole nation equal treatment (which in itself is a pretty foreign concept - I'm too used to how national news programs usually cut to local weather forecasts). On the other hand, the tv weather report teaches us French geography and weather vocab, not to mention the added bonus of watching the extremely stylish and always chipper "meteorologist" (scare quotes because she never studied meteorology, which leads me to believe she was hired for being peppy and photogenic).

If you made it to the end of the report, you saw a brief informational graphic letting the public know which Saint's day it is. The Saint's day also appears at the bottom of the Météo France report, as you can just barely make out below. This boggles my mind: publicly-owned news services advertise Catholic Saint's days, but kids still can't wear headscarves, yarmulkes or cross-necklaces in public schools. Seriously!?

Other than the Saint's day thing, we only have one complaint about French meteorology. Both the website and the tv report lack one important component of American weather forecasts: "real-time" radar. As far as I can tell, French radar only shows up to six hours before the present time, which is not very useful when I want to know whether it's going to rain in the next twenty minutes. Instead of up-to-the-minute radar, Météo France offers "Prévision de pluie à 1 heure," a decidedly lo-tech presentation of the likelihood of rain over the next hour.

Yellow is no rain, light gray is light rain, medium gray is moderate rain, and dark gray is heavy rain. White would mean no information available. I guess this is just as scientific as the "40% chance of rain" descriptions we get in the US, but for some reason it strikes us as quaint and imprecise.