‘Weatherman, at 78, Is Still Years Ahead of the Field’

Thanks for the excellent article (Oct. 14) about Dr. Irving P. Krick, “Weatherman, at 78, Is Still Years Ahead of the Field.”

As an Air Corps meteorology student at Caltech in 1940-41, I had the pleasure of observing Krick give outstanding examples of his personal genius as a weather forecaster. Each day each student, member of the teaching staff, and Krick himself made forecasts for three reporting stations for 24, 48 and 72 hours in advance of the current data. We all worked from the same actual current data and not from prior “canned” maps. Based upon a “golf-game” type scoring system, Krick was consistently about twice as accurate as the best of students or staff, and three to four times as accurate as the average student.

Krick gave a very practical course in the art of weather forecasting, without neglecting the theories then available. He emphasized visualizing the atmosphere in three dimensions and over a very large area--from Japan to Bermuda, for example. This training, plus his long-range concepts, enabled me to forecast terminal weather conditions along the Pacific Coast with considerable accuracy for periods of as much as 48 hours in advance at a time after Pearl Harbor when there were no reports of weather conditions over the ocean. Today, satellite pictures provide much of the then non-available information.

I also had the privilege of attending his course in long-range forecasting. The knowledge gained there served me in good stead over the next several years. On one occasion I was able to help schedule, some three weeks in advance, the day-to-day hourly movement of an entire heavy bomber group over a two-week period--with near 100% accuracy as to weather conditions at each point en route from Oklahoma to Maine.

Krick may not have had a “hot line” to Mother Nature--but many of us thought he must. Someday, perhaps, scientists will be able to incorporate the concepts of Dr. Krick with those of Jerome Namias and others to generate long-range forecasts of even greater accuracy than now.

PRESTON L. HILL

Westminster