by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
But they sure come in handy when tornadoes spring up, hurricanes are getting whipped into shape out in the Atlantic Ocean and a steady rain is turning babbling brooks into flash floods.
Forecasting severe conditions, by itself, is not necessarily the biggest part of a meteorologist’s job. Figuring out what to do with the information is.
“It’s observing it, diagnosing — what does it mean? — forecasting and deciding whether it’s bad enough to warn people,” said Bill Read, president of the National Weather Association. “So decision-making is a big thing to learn.
“And communicating. That’s sometimes the Achilles’ heel. How do you communicate a complicated and uncertain system, like a hurricane, five days out? How do you communicate that threat in the proper manner for people to do the right thing?”
Read, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s Forecast Office for Houston/Galveston, is one of 400 NWA members who have been attending the 28th annual meeting at the Adam’s Mark Hotel.
“We have 3,000 members,” said Read, “and we continue to grow. “Ten years ago, we were closer to 2,000.”
Membership in the organization includes degreed meteorologists; related professionals, such as hydrologists; technology engineers, who develop the hardware and software seen on television; broadcasters; military weather people; and journalists trained in meteorology.
Members began arriving over the weekend, and many attended a scholarship fund raiser Saturday at St. Johns Golf and Country Club. Workshops for broadcasters were held Sunday. The general sessions started Monday and will conclude today.
Seminar topics covered practically every condition except clear skies. Florida hurricanes and New England tornadoes. The 1987 Veterans’ Day snowstorm and the future of storm tracking. Typhoons and South Dakota’s Tornadofest.
“We informed broadcasters of new and different things we’re doing that might impact their work,” said Read. “The broadcasters themselves share critical successes and interesting stories they did.
“We had a session where they played tapes of their broadcasts, critiquing each other, getting a bit of coaching from their counterparts.”
Those who think they might be interested in a career in meteorology should consider the ease with which they understand high-level math and physics, said Read. The core courses for meteorology resemble those needed in engineering, such as hydrodynamics.
Students should also be “almost a whiz” with computers, “to broaden your employability and probably to actually develop applications on them.
“And there’s communication skills. That’s the underplayed part. None of us liked English if we were into science. Most of us have to learn that on the fly after we get a job.”
Read has had a lifelong fascination with the weather, the result, his father said, “of a defective gene.”
“Most little kids, if you have
a bad thunderstorm going on, are cowering and wondering if it’s the end of the world,” he said. “I’d be there with my nose pasted on the glass, looking at it.”
The public doesn’t cotton to errant forecasts, even though a 30-mile range is a lot for thunderstorm weather. People want to know what the weather will be like in their back yard, not
across town. A group of tourists heading out for a day of deep-sea fishing want to be reasonably
sure they’ll have clear sailing and won’t get rolled on by St. Elmo’s Fire.
“A lot of people do verification studies on forecasts at universities that have no particular agenda,” said Read. “So it’s a very objective number.
“And some days we do miss it. But, in general, we’re still dealing with forecasting in a concise manner, trying to get complex information out to a broad area, to the greatest number of people in a way they can understand.”
With improvements in technology, forecasters do a better job than before in tracking the appearance, path and strength of serious storms.
Meteorologists now provide up to 10 minutes of warning for tornadoes, a considerable improvement over the one to five minutes that was the norm 10 years ago.
Radar also allows forecasters to track hurricanes as they pick up strength, giving people days to find refuge.
However, meteorologists still can’t tell which thunderclouds
will launch bolts of lightning, “which, if you look at the fatalities and injuries statistics, is far and away a bigger problem than tornadoes.”
A big element in forecasting is the blend of event and time. The process would be a whole lot easier if everything stayed the same. But it doesn’t. Stuff happens.
“If it’s the middle of winter,” said Read, “with a lot of fronts coming through, and you’re trying to forecast what the high temperature’s going to be here 10 days from now, I wouldn’t bet much money on that. There’s a lot of uncertainty with the timing of things.”