On Cloud Nine : Lifelong Weather Men Live a Dream in This State of Uncertainty

Back when William Mork was Billy Mork, he spent a lot of time studying the clouds above Wichita, Kan., which says as much about Wichita as it does about Mork. He wasn’t scanning for puffs of phantasmagoric elephants or cumulous rabbits or two-headed dinosaurs. Nor was he contemplating the mysteries of heaven or wishing he could fly.

Mork was preparing his 9 a.m. weather forecast delivered daily to Miss Harris’ fifth-grade class. With a little help from radio reports by an unlikely childhood idol, Vic Phillips of the National Weather Service, Mork would assess conditions, then offer his predictions.

“I have been extraordinarily focused,” says Mork, who grew up to become climatologist for the state of California.

A self-described “cloud freak,” at 57 he still watches the sky, still sees beauty and drama in clouds. He has taken thousands of pictures of them--even those bearing no resemblance to elephants. He loves trains and has taken many photographs of them too.

“I have a lot of pictures of railroads,” he says, “with clouds in the background.”

He recalls his first tornado warning the way most kids recall their first tornado. “It was 1947. I was 10 and they issued tornado warnings during the night for portions of Oklahoma,” says Mork, who as staff meteorologist works closely with Maurice Roos, the state’s chief hydrologist--and like Mork, a person primarily heard from during feast or famine weather conditions.

Now, when Roos was a youngster, he would frolic in the irrigation canals of his parents’ farm in the San Joaquin Valley for the simple reason that he liked water. Such inclination might spark visions of swashbuckling pirates or shark-dodging divers or bronzed lifeguards--not hydrologists.

But that’s what Roos became. (He’s also a leading expert on drought.) Both Mork and Roos, 60, ended up with the state Department of Water Resources’ Division of Flood Management in Sacramento, and when the rains fall hard and the rivers swell with fury, they are neck deep in questions, wallowing through a flood of information pouring in from throughout the state. In cooperation with federal and local agencies, they search for answers, provide insights that might help save property and lives.

How much rain? When will it stop? Will rivers and reservoirs contain? Will crops die?

And when it doesn’t rain, there is another set of concerns: How little rain? When will it start? Will rivers and reservoirs run dry? Will crops die?

It’s important information, and it’s work they enjoy and have always wanted to do. Bill and Maurice, climatologist and hydrologist, a couple of guys in Sacramento who dared to dream of becoming--a climatologist and a hydrologist.

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Watching storms develop is like watching a child grow, only it happens much faster. Mork’s mom and dad, homemaker and chiropractor, might easily have predicted their son would become a meteorologist. He showed all the signs.

Sometimes weather conditions provide similar warning as conditions fall into place, mocking the early stages of monster storms of years past. El Nino awakens, flexes and bares its teeth. The southern oscillation index turns negative, which is when there is higher pressure in Darwin Australia than Tahiti. The jet stream snakes down, as we saw in January, and it’s time to batten down the hatch and haul Grandma to the attic.

Mork, who gets a lot of calls from reporters during the rainy season, which ends in April, is skilled at reducing blocks of technical information to more digestible chunks for non-technical scribes. “One helluva storm” is another way of putting it.

In January, record rain fell in some portions of the state, making life miserable for a lot of people who don’t sell carpeting, sandbags or umbrellas. Atop the Postal Service building in downtown Sacramento, for instance, the rain gauge guzzled 1.27 inches in the half-hour between 6:30 and 7 p.m. on Jan. 9.

“For that half-hour,” Mork says, “it was a 10,000-year return for that location,” fitting the definition of a helluva storm. Based on data collected over the years, the probability of such rainfall would be once every 10,000 years--at least on top of the Postal Service building in downtown Sacramento, Mork says.

In downtown Santa Barbara, January’s monthly total of 21.94 inches exceeded a record set in February, 1962, Mork says. Records there go back to 1867.

That’s the kind of stuff climatologists know about. They study, archive and publish weather data, which is useful to people from riparian landowners to whitewater river rafters to engineers designing Postal Service buildings they hope will withstand 10,000-year storms.

Mork and Roos study what is arguably the most diverse set of weather conditions in any state--from Death Valley, dabbed by 2.28 inches of precipitation annually, to the northern mountains, which receive more than 120 inches.

It is a state where weather commands respect with repeated force.

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As meteorologist, Mork’s responsibilities shift to day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute forecasting and analysis. Each morning he arrives at work by 7:20 to compile data for a 9:30 weather briefing for 20 to 50 people, most of them state and federal employees, whose responsibilities are dependent on the weather. People like Roos.

Once the rain hits the ground, or when snow melts to runoff, it becomes Roos’ concern. As hydrologist, he studies water supplies and patterns, how water gets or doesn’t get from Point A to Point B. Residents of Northern California are quick to inject into just about any conversation that the 49ers rule and that in terms of water diversion, they are Point A.

We in Southern California, on the other hand, are Point B and are therefore flushing their water down our toilets, not dissimilar to what they did up north to our Raiders last September.

But back to our story. . . .

Since Sacramento is a long ways to drive for a bucket of water, there is the State Water Project, which delivers almost 30% of the South Coastal Region’s supply from the Sacramento and San Joaquin river areas. Overall, about two-thirds of our water is imported, Roos says. Nothing like rubbing it in.

Weather people, however, tend to be non-judgmental, says Mork, who also teaches meteorology at Solano Community College, Fairfield. When they see forces of humanity running contrary to forces of nature, they tend to do little more than shake their heads.

“I think most climatologists are not very political, so we just sort of view these things as being very strange,” he says. “But, you know, how strange is California? Aren’t we kind of strange anyway?”

If California is strange--which it undoubtedly is--what does that make Wichita? Mork says he probably wouldn’t have been attracted to weather work had he grown up in California, far from the dramatic clouds of his childhood.

It’s more likely young Billy would have stood and delivered to fellow fifth-graders something more familiar to Southern Californians--like SigAlerts.