Lots of people — all over Mississippi — were fussing on Tuesday morning about something missing.

Despite nearly statewide warnings of a pending 1 to 3 inches of snow in the forecast, most places received only a dusting, if anything.

How could the forecast be missed by so much?

Easy, predicting weather is difficult. It always has been and it always will be. The forces that move in our atmosphere are of enormous proportion and power.

While technology has vastly improved the reliability of forecasting, it’s not perfect and it relies on people to create, interpret and community predictions.

On Tuesday, they missed plain and simple.

The result was hundreds of thousands of Mississippians who expected snow when they woke up, but found none.

For tens of thousands of Mississippi school children, the lack of snow was disappointing, but nonetheless welcome as it meant an elusive Mississippi snow day off from school.

Just like the criticism levied at weather forecasters, many people — mostly parents of small children — were critical of school administrators for pulling the plug on school based on the forecast.

Deciding a thumbs-up and thumbs-down on such a day is never easy for administrators.

Choose incorrectly and you’re a goat either way.

But the fact is student lives hang in the balance of such a decision and had a school bus had a mishap on a slick road lives very well could have been lost based on a single decision.

Let’s chalk up the great Mississippi blizzard of 2019 to a cautious error, nothing more and nothing less. We’re all human and we’re all flawed, so let the person who hasn’t made an error in their own lives and work cast the first verbal stone of criticism.