State-of-the-Art Forecast for Oxnard : Meteorology: The National Weather Service begins operations at its new high-tech Ventura County home after move from L.A.

A team of National Weather Service meteorologists this morning will begin watching the weather from a windowless office in an Oxnard industrial park.

The regional office responsible for forecasting climatic changes across Southern California moved from Los Angeles this week as part of a national program to modernize the National Weather Service and improve its accuracy in predicting the weather.

Within the next few years, the weather service plans to replace antiquated computers at the Oxnard regional office with new state-of-the-art equipment.

The centerpiece of the new program is a radar station scheduled to be installed in December atop Sulphur Mountain between Ojai and Santa Paula. The new radar is far more powerful than the weather service’s existing radar equipment, some of which dates back to the 1940s.

The new radar, replacing the equipment on top of the Federal Building in Westwood, will provide a much more accurate picture of the atmosphere in a 125-mile radius around the station.

Sulphur Mountain was chosen because it is strategically located in a network of radar planned across California, said Jerry McDuffie, area manager for the service.

Once it became the new location for the radar station, the next logical step was to move the forecasting office itself to somewhere close by, McDuffie said.

“To get the data from Sulphur Mountain to Los Angeles would be inefficient and expensive, requiring either three or four relay stations or a dedicated line,” he said. “It’s also a more desirable location than Los Angeles is for our employees.”

Until other regional offices are set up, the Oxnard office and another in San Francisco will be responsible for tracking climatic patterns for all of California. Meteorologists based in Oxnard forecast the weather in an area that stretches from Santa Barbara County to the Mexican boarder and as far east as Inyo County, McDuffie said.

Within the next two to three years, when other offices come on line, Oxnard forecasting office’s area of responsibility will shrink to Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, western Riverside and southwestern San Bernardino counties.

About 30 employees, including 20 meteorologists, who used to work in Los Angeles, will now report to work in Oxnard.

Some longtime weather service employees have objected to the move because of long commutes from their Los Angeles County homes. And a union for National Weather Service employees unsuccessfully sued to block the relocation.

But Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez said he believes the federal employees will find their concerns unfounded, once they get to know the city.

“There is less traffic, it’s safer, and much nicer than Los Angeles,” he said. He suggested those employees with homes in Los Angeles move to Oxnard. “We have plenty of housing. We can accommodate them,” he said.

Once the equipment in Oxnard is updated, meteorologists will be able to forecast changes in weather more accurately and more quickly, especially during extreme conditions, McDuffie said.

The present system “can’t see very far at all when heavy rain is falling,” he said. “That’s what happened in 1992. We couldn’t see that heavy rain over the Sepulveda Dam.” The Sepulveda Basin flooded during that heavy storm, swamping dozens of cars and leaving motorists stranded on their vehicle rooftops.

One of the new radar systems is already installed at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Oxnard office can draw information from that station during the interim until the Sulphur Mountain radar is ready.

Meteorologists said the new radar will need to be adjusted for the area’s foggy coastline. It’s so sensitive, the radar can interpret cool moist air off the ocean as flooding. The radar images shown on a multicolored screen can also pick up swarms of insects and flocks of birds.

“We’ve even seen a sunrise on this thing,” said lead forecaster Jay Stockton.

Before the turn of the century, the Oxnard weather station also will be equipped with a new computer that can bring together data from a variety of weather monitors, allowing extraordinarily fast and accurate forecasting. Meteorologists said they are looking forward to the new computer, the Advanced Weather Information Processing System, or AWIP, to be installed by about 1998.

“Right now, I have to pull data from three or four stations,” aviation forecaster Andrew Rorke said. He examines a satellite picture at one station, maps at another, radar information from another and stream saturation levels from a fourth station. “With AWIP, all those things will be integrated into one work station,” he said.

The move to Oxnard will not affect National Weather Service meteorologist Terry Schaeffer in Santa Paula, who forecasts temperatures, rainfall and frost for growers in the agricultural valleys.

McDuffie said Schaeffer can better serve agriculture in the county from his present location at the agricultural commissioner’s office in Santa Paula.

“The growers hang their livelihood on what he says each morning,” McDuffie said.