Are there mileposts in your life marked by what the weather was doing that day? Indelible images of cotton puff cumulus, menacing membranes of mist or gutter-gushing rivers of rain cascading through the streets? Or a dismal, damp and dull dreary day, from the first minutes of its drippy dawn through the day's dim demise after dinner? What about incandescent heat? Or thumb-numbing
needles of cold rattling through the weary weeks of
winter? Or maybe the first warm spring breeze of chameleon March caressing the crocus or teasing the tulips, coaxing the blossom world out of its winter slumber, whispering that we should love life and its annual rebirth? Or, is the pristine sparkle of a snow-draped winter morning framing a memory that you carry through life?
For many of us, there's one set of recent images that are indelibly fixed in our minds. We recall the irony of a crystal blue sky and dazzling sunshine as terrorists steered planes into the World Trade Center. Then there was the eerie quiet that night as no jets passed high overhead, and the wispy, wind-smeared lines painted by the fast-condensing water vapor in jet exhaust were absent. My memory includes another chilling aspect of September 11: a strong hurricane was just a few hundred miles off the East Coast that morning. If only the storm had hit land, would the perpetrators have been thwarted by flight cancellations? More likely, the date was firmed up because the terrorists knew the weather was going to be perfect. They had access to a bewildering array of weather data, pictures and forecasts that enabled them, like to rest of us, to get weather information when and where it's needed.
It's as if every one of us has a memory chip deep inside us where the weather for a particular event resides. For most of us, it's an almost unconscious occurrence. We may listen to weather reports, stare endlessly at The Weather Channel or AccuWeather.com, but we don't really know much about the weather or how to respond to it. But we keep it stored in our memory banks.
"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," wrote Hartford Courant editor Charles Dudley Warner in August 1897. The forerunner of today's National Weather Service was 26 years old at the time, and it controlled the collection and distribution of weather information like any well-established bureaucracy. Government control of information was neither new nor unique in that time, but it nonetheless
contributed to the worst natural catastrophe ever to hit the United States. Three years later, a fierce hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas, and at least 6,000 people perished. Cuban meteorologists were convinced that a strengthening tropical storm existed days before. However, as Erik Larson contends in his fascinating Isaac's Storm (Random House, 1999), the United States Weather Bureau went out of its way to discredit the Cubans. Cuban meteorologists had made great strides in hurricane forecasting. They had to: Cuba was repeatedly hit by ferocious storms. (And you thought Cubans were best known for their cigars!) But Willis Moore, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, wanted his agency to be in charge of hurricane forecasting, not the Cubans or, for that matter, anyone else. A month before the disaster, Moore had arranged for the War Department to ban telegraphic reports in and out of the Cuban weather service. This level of control was possible because the United States had run Cuba since the Spanish-American War
two years earlier. In this competitive atmosphere of hoarding weather information, any forecasts by outside agencies were to be ignored. Going right along was Issac Cline, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau in Galveston. Confident in his agency's prowess and on his complete understanding of the atmosphere, Cline and crew downplayed the storm until it was tragically too late to evacuate and save the thousands of vacationers on Galveston Island.
What does any of this have to do with why interest in the weather has dramatically increased? And how can I claim that a lot of smart people are interested in the weather at all? I say, look who's reading this? Case closed.
But that pervasive interest is understandable. Weather has become a major influence in world events, and interest in the weather has long been an obsession. In colonial times, the clergy took special note of the weather. At a typical Sunday service, bad storms could be cited as retribution for man's sins. Today, the obsession is secular. Ask meteorologists when they became so interested in the weather that they wanted to pursue it as a career, and most will answer before they were 10. I was only five. In fact, I played a weatherman in a class play in second grade. Today, when I speak to groups, the notes to whoever is going to introduce me explain that there was a thunderstorm outside the hospital when I was born. Once the story was told to the Philadelphia Rotary Club. After the talk, a man came forward and claimed he was probably the only one there who could vouch for the thunderstorm: he delivered me! The man introduced himself and I immediately recognized his name -- that of my mother's doctor. Thinking about that now, it is interesting that this doctor was so attuned to the weather that he remembered a storm from more than half a century ago.
There are myriad reasons why weather captures our memories, and our search for predictions about it taking up more and more time. Since the 1980s, The Weather Channel has provided a 24/7 window to the outdoors. On the Internet, AccuWeather.com forecasts every gust, drop and flake. Weather also has been a key element on the local news. A camcorder and reporter add up to a story that can be enlightening, chilling or all wet -- with none of the psychological or political baggage of "issues" that surround headline news.
Just about anywhere you go, the meteorologists of the area will lament that their region's weather is among the hardest to predict. I call this "meteorological mystique," but in a sense it's true. In Omaha, Nebraska, and Kansas City, a serene summer night can suddenly light up and explode with stratosphere-piercing thunderstorms that didn't exist hours earlier. In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, there's the elusive snow-rain line. As a city worker in Baltimore put it, "in one storm we can be plowing on Northern Avenue while we're pumping out basements in Dundalk."
Here's a secret: forecasters in almost any city have a local anomaly that makes their weather unique. Along the East Coast, you have a big snow-rain deciding factor: the fall line. This is where the terrain
suddenly rises from flat coastal plain to hilly piedmont, causing
temperatures to drop by several degrees. The same terrain jump is found in northwest Washington, D.C., Passaic County, New Jersey -- outside New York City -- and on Route 128 (I-95) west and northwest of Boston. In Florida, the sea-breeze boundary marks the trigger zone for majestic thunderheads that tower into the humid skies. And while San Franciscans have one of the most consistent year-round climates, the flowing fingers of fog fascinate. And whether it's a chilly spring day in Chicago's Loop or 25 billion pounds of snow on Buffalo (Christmas time, 2001), it's all lake effect. On the Buffalo snow, I can make a case for how it's caused by global warming, but that's for another article. Hint: the snow blitz came after one of the warmest autumns ever.
In the examples above, it shows just how capricious the weather can be, and how hard it is to forecast the precise location of where rain will turn to snow, or where exactly a thunderstorm will strike. Thus, local knowledge becomes an important element in any prediction.
When Warner penned his "Everybody talks about the weather…" line in 1897, only the weather elite had access to any kind of comprehensive weather data, or the kind of insights I mentioned above. Now, everyone can simultaneously have the same information that meteorologists have. Golfers scan The Weather Channel radar reports to scope out a nearby thunderstorm, soccer moms plan their attire for after-school games; all of us can participate in watching the weather's tranquility or torment on the TV screen.
In a world where terrorists inflict infinite injustice, and accidents and sickness mean tomorrow is never guaranteed, the weather forecast is the one place where tomorrow is as sure as death and taxes. Sure, today's weather may just be a tiny grain of sand on the beachhead of our existence. But the forecasters' offer of tomorrow is like a torch for the human spirit that no north wind on earth can blow out.
Elliot Abrams is the senior vice president and chief meteorologist at AccuWeather Inc. If you're a weather fanatic, too, join weathermatrix.org.
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