Meet the Man Who Keeps a Weather Eye Peeled on San Diego

Wilbur Shigehara agonized as he studied time-lapse satellite photos on his computer screen showing a Pacific storm approaching the Northern California coast.

Should his Friday afternoon forecast for the next couple of days in San Diego include a 20% chance of a little rain for Saturday evening? Computerized pressure and wind charts of half the world’s weather, as well as the latest photos, told him that the storm was breaking up rapidly and would bring only a spritz of moisture even if it reached as far south as Southern California.

So why spend so much time over whether to predict a potential tenth-of-an-inch of rain, the the kind of weather that citizens of Wichita Falls, Texas--Shigehara’s first post as a forecaster 25 years ago--probably wouldn’t even notice?

“It’s a matter of credibility no matter whether a storm could bring a tenth-of-an-inch or 10 inches,” answered Shigehara, chief National Weather Service meteorologist the past eight years for San Diego County, an area the size of Connecticut. “A big part of my job is community service and having people understand the weather.

“And besides, I’ve learned that weather in San Diego doesn’t have to be very severe to get people excited”--including, the animated Shigehara could have added, himself as well.

By all accounts, Shigehara has done a stellar job in keeping the weather office visible in San Diego, especially with the multimillion-dollar agricultural community whose fortunes can rise or fall depending on enough advance warning of a killing winter freeze.

“Wilbur is a really neat guy who’s become very fond of San Diego County and he bends over backwards to help the public and do whatever he can,” said Bob Dale, long-time San Diego weather personality now at KNSD (Channel 39).

Dale calls the weather service daily for advice on how to tailor his broadcasts. “There have been meteorologists in the past who haven’t always taken that interest with the public,” Dale said. “His ag reports are very detailed for farmers and he goes to so many meetings with the Kiwanis, all the various clubs. If he has any fault, it’s that he tries to please everybody, in the weather service and the public-at-large.”

Added Mike Ambrose, Dale’s counterpart at KGTV (Channel 10): “Wilbur is one of a kind. He’s always friendly, certainly helpful, and always willing to take as much time as required to explain what I need to hear . . . . It seems like he’s been here forever.”

For both the electronic and print media, Shigehara is a veritable fount of information, always having a plethora of statistics at his fingertips as well as colorful descriptions to accentuate the impact of a particular weather system.

“The Yukon Express” and “winter with a vengeance” are how Shigehara explained last week’s numbing cold that broke temperature records and brought more than a foot of snow to area mountains. A more typical sunny San Diego picture often ends up as a “real Chamber of Commerce weekend” in his lexicon. And when the occasional--and much needed--rainstorm manages to soak the county, Shigehara expresses his own satisfaction at “a million-dollar rainfall for San Diego.”

“If I’ve got nothing available to talk about for the weekend, I just ask Wilbur two or three questions and I’ve got the (segment) filled up,” Ambrose said. “His weather synopses are poetry, living poetry--if a two-syllable word will work, then for Wilbur a four-syllable word will work even better.

“I’m convinced that Wilbur was doing weather forecasts when he was 6 months old.”

Actually, the 50-year-old native of Hilo, Hawaii, wanted to be a geologist, but while obtaining his BA degree at Fresno State College, he found he suffered claustrophobia when entering caves to do field work, “a weird feeling.” A related alternative, field mapping, had no appeal because “you’re out in the field for weeks, remote and lonely, not seeing any people,” he said.

While fulfilling an Air Force ROTC obligation following his college graduation, Shigehara took the Air Force up on an offer to send him to school for weather training and he obtained a second BA in meteorology at San Jose State.

After finishing his military service doing forecasting for the Air Force, Shigehara joined the National Weather Service in Wichita Falls. Following his three-year stint there, he served in Albuquerque; Pomona; Modesto; Missoula, Mont. (where he did fire season forecasting); Santa Maria, and Los Angeles, before coming to San Diego to head its office.

Shigehara’s time in Pomona and Modesto centered on agricultural forecasting, a specialty that he also spends a substantial amount of time on in San Diego during the winter months. He puts out a agricultural forecast with frost information and receives at least a half-dozen calls daily from avocado and citrus growers wanting information as far in advance as possible.

“For them, I try to be as specific as possible, to write for them in a conversational form, because a freeze can mean real monetary losses and they pay close attention to the forecasts,” he said, recalling one farmer in Modesto who hired four helicopters to circulate and warm the air over 1,500 acres of almonds after cold weather was predicted.

“We consider his work extremely important,” Ric Opel, farm manager for Henry Avocado in Escondido, one of the county’s largest growers, said. “This time of the year we follow very closely the forecasts and they are very reliable.”

Shigehara received the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Silver Medal Award last year for “superior performance” in warning farmers about freezes during the 1987-88 winter when cold weather frequently hit inland county growing regions.

So Shigehara takes his weather seriously. On the particular Friday with the hard-to-predict storm, he talked several times with the large Los Angeles regional office, which issues overall forecasts for Southern California and whose predictions those of smaller offices such as San Diego must agree with.

Los Angeles had said that rain was likely, “a 70% probability” in their zone forecasts, and Shigehara thought the number should be toned down, or that “chance” should be substituted for “likely.”

“They’re putting all the marbles on the line,” he said in hanging up the phone in good-natured exasperation after failing to persuade his colleagues.

Several days later, after the storm indeed fizzled and brought only a trace of rain to San Diego--and none to Los Angeles--Shigehara was asked whether he would point that out to the regional office.

“Oh, no, you never pour salt in the wound and point your finger when a forecast doesn’t work out,” he said. “You keep your mouth shut and let mad dogs lie because you never know when the same thing will happen to you.”

With a wealth of worldwide weather data and the improvement of computer weather models--Shigehara and his colleagues have four at their disposal daily, including a well-respected European climatological model--he admits that general short-term forecasting for any specific area can be done from just about anywhere using electronic information. That’s how the cable Weather Channel operates, drawing up area forecasts from available National Weather Service data.

“You can do a San Diego forecast out of L.A. or out of Japan, for that matter,” Shigehara said. “But I think the value to being in San Diego is the intense concentration, the empathy, the concern I can bring to what is happening here, to be able to focus in much more detail . . . and experience can tell you when to be cautious about following a pattern that seems to be developing.”

In addition, despite San Diego’s reputation for having fine weather year-round, Shigehara said he sometimes is surprised “at how drastic the changes can be during this time of the year,” in particular for county mountain and desert areas not normally associated with the region’s coastal image.

For that reason, Shigehara admits to some dislike of television weathercasters “who act like goofballs or clowns.

“Yes, I think it rubs meteorologists the wrong way and is insulting to the public,” he said. “I think that the public wants to have straightforward weather, to have a good presentation.

“That’s what I believe in, that a big part of my job is community relations. I guess in a way that is why I have never wanted to move on to headquarters, because I like working with people. I really enjoy this.”

He patiently takes calls on a daily basis, ranging from a man wanting to know the dew point on a particular date in 1936 to a woman asking if Shigehara can install a community weather station in Tecate (no, because there is already a 100-year-old station in nearby Campo), to another man who has been feeling bad lately and wanted to know if temperature changes were the culprit.

“Sorry, that’s one guy I can’t help,” Shigehara chuckled after the call.