Deluge Puts Meteorologists at Eye of Storm

From a computerized crow’s nest 11 stories above Los Angeles, Steve Starmer is looking toward the northwest. An ill wind is blowing.

“We’ve got a jet stream coming up through here,” observes the National Weather Service forecaster, watching patterns of arctic air flow on a display of infrared satellite pictures. He then notes something else, something unwelcome: a second jet stream blowing across the subtropic zone, threatening to pick up part of the coming storm and kick it into high gear.

The bottom line: rain, and lots of it.

The minute-by-minute watch has put Starmer in the hot seat at the weather service’s Los Angeles headquarters. The pressure on him and the office’s crew of meteorologists and technicians is something that no one needs a barometer to read.

From within their dimly lighted Westwood office, the men and women of the weather service try to answer the questions on everyone’s mind these days: Is it going to rain? How much? Where?

In the current climate, when streams have been transformed into raging rivers and homeowners are bracing against mudslides and floods, accurate forecasts are everything. Perfection is demanded, though not always delivered.

Working round-the-clock, forecasters can be heroes one day, villains the next. Their work is a vital but esoteric amalgam of isobars and storm trajectories, temperature drops and adiabatic lapse rates.

Like three-dimensional chess, the ever-changing puzzle is excruciatingly complex, tracked by satellites, radar, weather balloons and aircraft. Data from an entire hemisphere funnels in to their cluttered quarters, where computers analyze it, model it and display it on multiscreen consoles that give the place the appearance of a space-flight center.

The forecaster’s job is to interpret the nuances, an uncomfortable middle ground between altitude physics and reading tea leaves.

“There’s a lot of pressure--a lot of pressure,” said forecaster Ivory Small, 30, who has never seen anything like this week’s bombardment since he joined the office in 1983, the year of the last big “El Nino” storms. Not even that tremulous period brought the kind of cloudbursts that have come this week, such as the four inches that fell in one day on Point Mugu.

“You work very hard on a week like this,” Small said. “It’s like predicting something that’s never happened. You don’t know if it’s going to happen--and you hope you’re accurate.”

On this day, the office is under a little extra scrutiny: A team headed by Bob Richey, chief of meteorological services for the weather service’s western regional headquarters, is monitoring the response to the storms. The review, similar to studies conducted during the Seattle floods of 1990 and the Oakland windstorm fires of a year ago, is designed to see where the Los Angeles office fails and where it excels.

One early conclusion of the team is that a Teletype tie-in is needed with the Army Corps of Engineers, a link that might have saved precious time evacuating residents before Monday’s flooding in the San Fernando Valley.

Not even such a link would have saved the area entirely, said Craig Peterson, 34, a lead forecaster who also specializes in hydrology--how water flows on and through the ground. Sitting at a computer wired to rainfall collecting stations, Peterson knows where the water is falling and where the creeks are rising.

Still, he said, Los Angeles is a “flashy” region--and he is not talking about Hollywood glitz. Canyons and runoff areas tend to fill rapidly--often within hours--which increases the likelihood of flash floods.

And Monday’s storm was downright freakish. “We didn’t realize we were going to get that much rainfall in that small an area in that short an amount of time,” Peterson said. “It was a small-scale phenomenon. We don’t do well with small-scale phenomena.”

Nearby, aviation forecaster Dick Hickey, 50, is suddenly on the red “hot line” phone to the Federal Aviation Administration. A few times a day, Hickey uses the special line to relay weather information affecting Southern California’s 14 major airports. Occasionally, that breaking information is relayed directly to or from pilots.

“It doesn’t look like the end of the world,” Hickey, a silver-haired man with a ponytail, said with a measure of hyperbole. He is talking about the incoming front, which nonetheless promises to pack a wallop. Its speed has been tracked near 30 m.p.h.

“It’s probably going to jam up Highway 14 by Gorman,” Hickey said. “Those roads are probably going to get snookered by the end of the night.” At that very moment, he added, the radar was picking up some squalls. “It’s a little more unstable than we thought.”

Deadlines face the crew almost constantly. The day’s lead forecaster, who occupies a bank of four computer screens, is responsible for putting out “zone” and “local” forecasts four times a day. The Southern California area includes 11 zones, and even the local forecasts are divided into four target areas--Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and San Bernardino County.

In addition, there are marine forecasts and a separate set of forecasts for airports.

Constantine Pashos, 30, who has been with the office two years, was on duty during the most memorable moment of this week’s storms--when lightning struck the weather service offices early Thursday, temporarily knocking out one of the two main computers.

“It was incredible,” he said. “It was the loudest thunder I’ve heard in the office. It was like you were outside.” The 4 a.m. strike was well before dawn, but the soaring cumulonimbus clouds were a sight to behold. “It looked really impressive on radar.”

But these storms are not much, said Hickey. Not when you compare them to some of the weather--the real weather--he has seen during his 21 years with the weather service, mostly in the East and Midwest.

A big storm? “I’ve seen six inches of rain in three hours in Cheyenne, Wyoming,” he boasts with a gush of enthusiasm. “A 64,000-foot thunder top! That was the greatest storm I ever saw.” Hickey recalls the date--Aug. 1, 1985--just as he remembers the date of the July 16, 1979, tornado that also swept through Cheyenne, the 1952 flood near Yuba City in California’s Central Valley, and other moments of havoc.

“I love the weather,” he said with a nod.

“That’s why I’m in this racket.”