All’s Fair in Art/Science of Region’s Forecasting

Long before the barometer was begat, man could tell it was going to rain.

The Cherokee, discerning a ring around the moon, would bid his squaw batten down the wigwam. The ancient mariner would drum a ditty into the ears of his oafish apprentice until the lad fair mumbled it in his sleep: “Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning. . . .” A squall rolling in from Iowa? Uncle Phil’s old shrapnel wound would know it before he did.

Folklore, they called it. And it worked. It dictated the tempo of crops, the course of battles, the discovery of America (albeit on the way to Calcutta).

It worked, that is, for the short run. For long-run forecasts, man had to wait for the U.S. Weather Service. Depending on how long the run, he is still waiting.

Expectations Outstrips Technology

Today’s forecasting capability is considerably more sophisticated than Uncle Phil’s hip. As usual, though, man’s expectations outstrip his technology.

A man in Downey, planning a neighborhood barbecue, calls the USWS. What he wants to know--demands to know--is whether it’s going to rain in his backyard at 5 p.m. two weeks from Saturday.

“We can’t tell him with 100% accuracy,” says Art Lessard, Southern California weather chief. “I seriously doubt if we’ll ever be able to tell him.”

The art/science of forecasting, nevertheless, is making progress--imperceptibly, perhaps, to the man on the suddenly soggy street, but measurably to the meteorologists.

“Put it this way,” Lessard says: “The five-day forecast that’s issued today is as accurate as the three-day forecast was 20 years ago. The 10-day mathematical model of the atmosphere is roughly equivalent to the five-day forecast of the ‘60s.”

Lessard, however, an acknowledged expert, is the first to admit that even in the ‘80s, we know more about Buddy Ryan’s 46

Defense than we do about “Mother Nature’s game plan.”

Moreover, even the standard 12-hour forecast is widely misunderstood. “That ‘30%-chance-of-rain’ ” Lessard says, “simply means that during that period of time you have a 30% chance of getting wet.”

Fair enough, even warmer, but even at that, the USWS can’t win. Should the sun shine, as is probable, you’ll likely wonder why they even bothered saying “30%.” And if you’re rained upon? “How come those turkeys said only 30%?”

The percentage of weather data-gathering sources, meanwhile, has increased a hundredfold in the recent past, almost to a Winchellian “Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea.” The weather services analyze data dispatched by everyone and everything from satellites to a guy in Agoura with a bucket on his back lawn. Lessard ticks off his sources:

--Satellite pictures are transmitted to Earth stations every 30 minutes. “A lot is inferred from the pictures: cloud movement, type, height, temperature. . . . Certain scanners now give you a vertical profile of what’s happening with humidity, temperature, wind.”

--Weather balloons all over the world, released twice daily, “rubber, helium-inflated, carrying instrumentation. Some of them go up to 140,000 feet. When they leave the ground they’re six feet in diameter. By the time they burst, at the top of the atmosphere, they’re the size of a three-story house.”

--Airports, airline pilots and the Federal Aviation Administration, which swaps data with the USWS.

--Ocean-going ships, 1,000 miles out or more; instrument-packed buoys, several hundred miles offshore; closer in, small-boat enthusiasts sharing their observations.

--”And locally? I have a guy in a bathing suit with a yardstick.”

The USWS strategically spots weather stations across varying terrain.

The service also enlists “paid observers,” for whom instruments are supplied, installed, maintained. “A lady and her husband, in a small house in Banning Pass, call in half a dozen times a day with cloud height, visibility, etc.,” Lessard says. “They’re paid so much for each observation.

“Then we have ‘cooperative observers,’ who phone in a lot of the information you read in the daily paper.

“They’re volunteers--ordinary people who are weather hobbyists. They do it just for the sake of the science.

“There are 2,400 of them in the U.S., 800 in California alone. I don’t care where it is, there’s a co-op somewhere near--on a mountaintop or in the depths of Death Valley, or it’s some little guy sitting on a half-acre who’s inherited the job from his father, his grandfather.

“They call in once a day, some reporting everything, others just one thing. Some of them have just the bare essentials; say, a plastic bucket for catching rain. Some have pretty elaborate installations. They’ll spend anything from $30 to $3,000.

“They’re very dedicated, very conscientious. Sure, you read ‘not available’ occasionally. Maybe the guy’s mother-in-law is visiting and he doesn’t want to go home that day. Most always, though, even when they go on vacation they have a backup: a wife, a next-door neighbor.

“They do it for the love of it.”

David Bender does it for the love of it, and then some.

In the backyard of his father’s house in Monrovia is a white wooden louvered box on stilts that looks like a time-share condo for sparrows. Inside the weather shelter is a battery of instruments, mostly thermometers mounted on special brackets. One tells maximum temperature, another minimum; a swing psychrometer, when twirled in the air like a sling, measures humidity and the dew point, “kind of like the temperature at which droplets will form on your beer mug,” Bender explains.

A thermograph--a revolving drum with pen pointer--records ongoing temperatures, and a light bulb is handy for resetting the instruments every midnight.

Out by the pool is a Goldbergian apparatus that catches and records rainfall.

On a table in Bender’s “computer room” is a melange of microbarographs and radiation detectors, a fanciful contrivance not even Bender can pronounce, a wind-speed indicator from World War II, notebooks, printouts, reams of graphs dating back to 1978.

“That’s when I started calling in my data,” says Bender, 25, “Jan. 1, 1978. Next day, I read in the paper the line under Monrovia and I said, ‘Hey, I did that!’ It was my little niche. . . .”

Curiously, it was not the weather that initially fascinated Bender. It was those odd instruments, cobwebbed in a corner of his science lab at Monrovia High, unused, inexplicable, about to be tossed out.

Bender took them home, restored them, began to appreciate that “it was the weather, after all, that controlled the equipment.”

One thing led to another. Newspapers began calling. TV stations. Pretty heady stuff for a high school kid, but nothing quite like the day he faced down the principal.

The weather was sweltering. The principal had decided to hold graduation indoors. “Dr. Dan, the Weather Man,” as Bender’s classmates called him, had noted that the temperature, while hot, was decreasing perceptibly. He persuaded the principal. The traditional outdoor ceremony was rescheduled.

“When they called me up for my diploma,” Bender recalls, “I got a cheer as big as the biggest football player. Now that was a high!”

Forecast to the contrary, Bender is not going to be a meteorologist. Too many interests now--”I make my living now in the technical end of TV”--of which the weather is only one.

Computers are another. Bender is hooking up his weather station to a computer that will automatically telephone his data to the USWS.

“But even if the family were to move away,” he says, “I’d like to pass on my station to the next resident. If you changed locations, you’d lose the continuity, the consistency, the . . . the satisfaction.”

Back in the forecast bureau in Westwood, Art Lessard ponders the satisfactions of his job. He does not find it wanting.

“I seriously doubt that in the foreseeable future our forecasts will work out 100% for everybody in the entire area,” he says, “but the science is improving all the time.

“When they ask me, ‘How accurate are your forecasts?,’ I tell them that statistics show I’m correct 85% of the time.

“My broker should do as well.”