Taking the Measure of the Weather : Sailing: Wind is like gasoline to America’s Cup boats, if you can find where it is.

The East Coast zip code minimizes Chris Bedford’s sleepless nights.

“I’m glad I’m far away,” Bedford said from East Syracuse, N.Y. “If things go wrong, they can’t get to me.”

This is especially true when the America’s Cup Organizing Committee would have to trudge through 10 inches of snow to get there. Bedford, a meteorology specialist, has been retained as the ACOC’s weather consultant for the America’s Cup racing.

Bedford defies logic by delivering forecasts from 3,100 miles away. No matter. He could deliver San Diego weather reports from Sri Lanka or Senegal if he had to.

“Forecasts are based on weather data and it’s all available by satellite,” he said. “You can access it anywhere in the world. I could make my forecasts from Bombay.”

Weather is a non-factor if you’re indoors playing for an NBA title, but what could be more important when you’re sailing for the America’s Cup? Taking the wind out of the Cup would be like taking the bats out of baseball.

“Wind is the gasoline for the engine of the boats,” said Bedford, who will come to San Diego in later defender trial rounds. “Sailors will come in mad because there’s no wind, and they blame the forecaster. But we’re only reporting it.”

No syndicate underestimates the importance of weather. The three richest challengers--Japan, New Zealand and Italy--employ full-time meteorologists to help the crews better understand and use the weather advantageously.

The other groups improvise.

The French use a San Diego-based French national to chart weather on race days; the Swedes’ American tender driver doubles as their weather guy; the two Australian groups use people within the syndicates to interpret data; and the Spaniards’ sole source of weather information is a Challengers of Record Committee-owned weather buoy, sitting five miles off Point Loma.

In the defenders’ camps, America 3 lured a San Diego native, Chris Crabtree, from a Santa Barbara environmental firm to act as its meteorologist, and Team Dennis Conner representative Barbara Schwartz said that information was “proprietary,” and no further information was forthcoming.

The meteorologist’s job is to translate the influx of data into laymen’s terms.

“Then you need to know how to use it,” Bedford said. “I just tell (ACOC) what the wind’s going to do and they take it from there.”

Bedford, Conner’s weather consultant in 1987 in Australia, said how well the crew can implement that information depends on how knowledgeable the sailors are.

“I’ve made forecasts for one of the best (sailors) in the world and for my dentist. The level of knowledge and experience varies,” he said. “You have to present the information in a way they can understand it. If it doesn’t help them perform, it’s of no value to them.”

Few weathermen have experience making predictions for sporting events, because so few events demand it. But Bedford has dabbled in other sports-related weather forecasting.

“I’ve done some for auto races,” he said. “When you’re driving vertically up a mountain slope for three miles, the density of the air changes and they have to know how that affects the way the car performs.”

Predicting weather may be deeply rooted in science, but as people who have ever cursed their local weatherman will attest, looking out the window is often as foolproof.

“Sometimes you just don’t know,” Bedford said, “and it can rip your guts out if you’re not sure about a forecast.”

Crabtree, who has spent the past 15 years studying air pollution, said: “The hardest thing to do, if you have a busted forecast, is get in front of (the crew) and convince them you know what you’re talking about. This is the most difficult forecasting job I’ve ever had, because of the detail they demand.”

Said Bedford: “I’m under a lot of pressure because they’re under a lot of pressure to run a good event. When I’m wrong, I feel I’ve let them down. But some things you just can’t predict. Sometimes you will be wrong.”

A forecast of “partially cloudy skies” may help you dress for work, but it’s useless to a crew trying to navigate its way around a 20-nautical-mile course or a race committee that is trying to set up that course.

“We have to provide them with more detailed information,” Bedford said. “It’s a pretty small area they’re sailing in. We have to refine forecast variables for them. Five to 15 knots won’t cut it. It has to be considerably more refined.”

A combination of science, communication skills and gut instinct help the forecaster arrive at the most detailed and accurate forecast possible, according to New Zealand meteorologist Bob McDavitt.

“Thirty percent of it is the science side, another 30% is the artistry you’ve got to feel for the weather,” McDavitt said. “Another 30% is being able to get the information across. You can have a good forecast, but if you can’t express it, forget it.”

And the other 10%?

“Luck.”

The more experienced a weatherman is, the better he knows how to read the signs in the sky . . . looking at the clouds, the swells and the breeze to determine which direction the boat goes.

“You don’t just say, ‘We’ll go left today because the wind is coming that way,’ ” McDavitt said.

And certainly not when you’re in San Diego. McDavitt finds prognosticating local weather a bit boggling.

“It’s really different over here,” he said. “Here you get the back edge or the fringe of weather systems, something like leftover weather. Little eddies form, like you get on a river bank. It’s pretty difficult to work out. There’s a chaotic flow.”

The longer they’ve been around, the better acquainted they are with San Diego’s peculiar patterns. Of the challengers, Australia’s Roger Badham has been on Il Moro’s staff for more than a year. But natives are even more at home with local weather swings.

“I have a real good feel for Southern California coastal weather in particular,” Crabtree said. “But you can’t focus on one part of the coast and expect to understand what’s going on everywhere.”

McDavitt worked with New Zealand in the Cup when it was closer to home in Australia. He found Fremantle’s breezes more consistent than San Diego’s.

“Here, the energy forces that mold it are further away then one would expect,” he said. “It’s harder to get year-round (forecasts) right here. Weather here can change from one side of Point Loma to Mission Bay.”

Sailors need up-to-the-minute and accurate forecasts for a detailed area, so giving them a generic forecast to cover a wide area won’t fly.

The Challengers’ of Record Committee spiced up the forecast by purchasing a weather-measuring device introduced to the America’s Cup in 1986-87. According to Ernie Taylor, CORC’s executive director, the committee bought an $84,000 weather buoy from Endeco/YSI of Massachusetts.

“What’s nice about it is you don’t have to be Einstein to figure it out,” Taylor said. “In computer terms, the information it supplies is user-friendly.”

This environmental buoy, which sits two miles from the starting line in a location approved by the Coast Guard, runs on 24 lantern batteries. It prints out air and water temperature, barometric pressure, solar radiation measurements, current meters, wind speed and direction and wave height and direction. The CORC can program the buoy so it can get updated information as often as every two minutes, but some information, like wind and wave speed and direction, can be accessed only twice an hour.

“It samples the information over a longer period to get a more accurate picture,” said Marc Mason, who set up the system for CORC. “It reports the average. Otherwise, the information is distorted.”

The machine is programmed so that challenging syndicates can purchase their own listening stations and plug into the system to access information.

“But the ability to take control has been taken out,” said Mason, who said the defenders can’t tap into it. “The CORC didn’t want the individual challengers to be able to take control.”

Weather measuring devices, according to Mason, were originally designed for defense-related uses, shipbuilding and port and harbor construction.

“So they’d have some idea of the area’s wave history, what kind of conditions your ship will see,” Mason said. “Also, to measure beach and shore erosion if you need to know how long the beach will be there.”

Mason said weather buoys have been around 15 to 20 years, but Endeco/YSI rolled many devices into one.

“What we did was get it all on one system,” he said. “From what I understand, in Fremantle they gathered information from different data systems. This has it all in one place.”

But even a flurry of meteorological feedback and the most advanced weather machines couldn’t make Round 1 of the defenders’ and challengers’ trials start on time.

Of the challengers’ seven racing days, scheduled to start at 11:30, one began on time. Five of the defenders’ nine racing days, with a 12:15 start when the wind is likelier to pick up, were on schedule.

“I don’t know who’s advising the CORC,” Bedford said. “I wonder if they forgot to take into account standard time versus daylight savings time?”

Said CORC Chairman Stan Reid, in defense of the scheduled early starts: “If anything happens (wind-wise), we want to be out there.”

As if daily forecasts aren’t tough enough, extended predictions are truly an imperfect science.

“Beyond 72 hours,” Bedford said, “outlooks are generalizations: temperatures above normal, wind speed moderate to heavy, we’re able to tell things like that.

“I have people calling me and asking if the weather will be nice for their daughter’s wedding. I’ll ask them when the wedding is and they say, ‘A year from now.’ I just laugh.”