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t: Olli
- Forwarded message ----------
From: maws_general_list <maws_general_list_ät_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 12:41:46 -0000
The view from Maryland...
"A growing army of 'weather nerds'"
... Spotters: Lovers of wind and rain devote their mania to public
service (Source: The Baltimore Sun, 11/3/04)
When weather forecasters warn of an approaching storm, Christine
Iacarino stays glued to the television and the Internet.
A prediction of snowfall overnight? She says it's all she can do to
get to sleep.
"I think it's the drama," says Iacarino, a social worker from the
Fullerton area of Baltimore County. "And I like to be informed about
what's coming my way."
Iacarino says she endured plenty of teasing from her husband about
being such a "weather nerd" that she would spend a Wednesday evening
in a government building's cafeteria, watching slides of cloud
formations and video clips of tornadoes. But she emerged last week
from the 2 1/2 -hour session a decal-displaying "weather spotter" who
will, when conditions warrant, call in hail storms and wind damage,
flash floods and snow accumulations.
For all the satellites, Doppler radar systems and other high-tech
instruments used to predict stormy weather and measure its effects,
the National Weather Service still counts on people like Iacarino who
want to help warn others about what's in store for them.
Last Wednesday night in Towson, about 80 people attended a Skywarn
Weather Spotters class conducted by a weather service meteorologist -
nearly doubling the number of spotters in the county.
There are about 20,000 registered weather spotters across the
country, including about 2,000 in the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia
area, according to the National Weather Service.
Among them is H. George Jackson Jr., who has been collecting weather
data for years and giving reports from his home in the Caroline
County crossroads of American Corner - "home," he says, "of the best
turnips in the world." Jackson says he checks his digital equipment
for accuracy with a "good old-fashioned thermometer, the kind with
the red stuff inside."
He says it's hard to pinpoint what it is about the weather that he
finds so fascinating.
"How do you explain a hobby?" he says. "I just love watching weather."
The National Weather Service, which has long received weather
information from amateur radio operators, formalized its training of
citizens in 1990. The service began offering more classes, often
sponsored by local government.
Baltimore County has hosted a weather spotters' course every few
years since the mid-1990s. A class two years ago drew about 25
people. But officials at the county Office of Emergency Management
say they might try to offer it more frequently after seeing the
interest it generated this week.
Organizers had to move Wednesday night's class from a conference room
in the public safety headquarters in Towson to the larger cafeteria.
During the class, David R. Manning, warning coordination
meteorologist in the Baltimore-Washington forecast office of the
National Weather Service in Sterling, Va., talks about updrafts, wall
clouds and funnel spotting as part of his slide presentation. He
shows clips of tornadoes and floods.
Some questions from the audience are technical, about the physics at
play in a storm, for example. Others want to know what happens to
weather balloons when they pop. (If it's a National Weather Service
balloon, the instruments inside float down on a parachute and then
biodegrade, although they have been mistaken for UFOs more than once,
Manning says.)
Manning also covers when weather spotters should call the National
Service: to report hail bigger than the size of peas, flooding or
wind damage, ice glazing on road surfaces or measurements of
significant rain or snow. "Significant" is considered an inch of
rain, 4 inches of snow and then every 2 inches above that, he says.
Spotters can submit their observations by e-mail, or by phone or ham
radio.
Volunteers need only a ruler, although rain and wind gauges are a
plus, Manning says.
"The observation of people on the ground can help fill in the blanks
left by technology and the limitations of science," he says.
Radar can show the areas where precipitation is the heaviest. But it
doesn't show whether it's a combination of rain and snow or sleet,
for example. And satellites and automated observation stations and
gauges don't show wind damage and can't measure snow or ice depth,
Manning says.
Having residents trained to spot the warning signs of bad weather,
such as a forming funnel cloud, also is helpful to emergency
officials, says Elise Armacost, a county Fire Department spokeswoman.
"We have an interest in having a network of citizens helping to
report signs of severe weather ... so that we can get out warnings as
quickly as possible," she says.
The volunteers willing to help in this effort include an off-duty
police officer who says he'd like one day to take a "storm-chasing"
vacation. A teacher from Overlea attending this week's session
acknowledges that he has stayed up nearly all night to see whether a
forecast for a storm turned out to be accurate. And a self-described
meteorologist "wannabe" from Hunt Valley says she has been fascinated
by weather since childhood.
Steve Pedri, a Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. repairman attending the
training session with his 12-year-old son, Dominic, says they have at
their Perry Hall home a weather instrument that measures "the whole
nine yards," including wind chill and dew point. Dominic turns on the
Weather Channel (dismissed by some as a cable-TV folly two decades
ago but now, according to its parent company, reaching 87 million
households) even before he checks out ESPN in the morning.
They track storms on the Internet and watch for darkening skies and
swirling clouds.
Steve Pedri says he is amazed how quickly weather can change. And
though he stresses that he hates to see "bad things happen" as a
result, he says, "I like severe weather."
//end//
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