Weathering the Storm : Inventor’s Forecasting System Finally Gets Its Day in the Sun

In hindsight, Oscar Singer should have predicted the storm that his new weather forecasting idea was going to cause.

Not many meteorologists, he admits, appreciate being told that their weather-watching techniques are so old-fashioned that their forecasts are doomed to be inaccurate.

Singer is a Los Angeles resident who has spent more than three decades trying to persuade experts that they can predict the weather with pinpoint accuracy with a decidedly low-tech method: plotting the path of storms with a simple grid system.

Until now, the pros’ responses have been something of a cold front.

Professional meteorologists have shrugged off Singer and his system, frostily suggesting that weather predicting has to be much more complicated than tracing angles on a map between high and low pressure points.

In the cluttered basement of his hillside City Terrace home, the 76-year-old former Air Force weather officer has tried to figure out a way to convince them.

He has studied more than 6,000 weather maps to verify his theory and has charted a crusade for recognition ranging from one-on-one confrontations at meteorological conferences to personally printing books that explain what he calls his revolution in weather forecasting.

Singer’s campaign started in 1968 when he saw an early satellite weather photo on television and was surprised to see a link between a series of storms across the hemisphere.

Puzzled, Singer rushed to the local National Weather Service office to see if the same storm pattern showed up on highly detailed government weather charts.

Singer says he was jolted by storms that seemed to be positioned at precise, fixed angles to one another on them too. Intrigued, he spent a week examining other old weather maps. Then a month.

“It was astonishing. There were angular relationships between storms on map after map,” said Singer, an ex-Air Force major working at the time as an electronics technician.

“They were moving in a lock-step pattern--the storms seemed to lock in on a target like a bull’s-eye. It was persistent and precise. I found another relationship, then another. I almost didn’t believe it myself.”

The trouble is that when Singer devised a grid system that he says exactly shows where storms will be positioned in 24 hours, the experts didn’t believe it.

Local weather forecasters shrugged off a mid-1970s demonstration of his weather-plotting technique--even after he accurately predicted the path of an East Coast storm that professional forecasters missed by 15 miles, Singer said.

“They told me I needed to talk to the National Weather Service in Washington, that there was a protocol they had to use before trying anything new.” The government told him to get published first.

But when he sent a paper explaining his concept to a leading meteorological magazine, editors rejected it after two of the three screeners became confused, according to Singer.

By the late 1970s Singer was attending professional meteorological meetings around the country in hopes of wrangling a few minutes at the podium or buttonholing weathermen at the door.

When that didn’t work, he spent 2 1/2 years in his basement writing the book he titled “Singer’s Lock--The Revolution in the Understanding of Weather.” Then he published it himself--printing it on a secondhand press that he set up in his backyard.

Singer and assistant Daniel Bender of Monrovia started mailing the books to experts. They followed that up by printing a series of pamphlets that amplified the book’s conclusions.

For a time, things started looking sunny.

Several potential investors surfaced, hinting that they might be willing to come up with the cash needed to develop software to run Singer’s storm-plotting system on desktop computers in weather stations everywhere. There was talk of national news coverage. Singer and Bender were invited to Cape Canaveral, where NASA officials gave them the royal treatment.

*

But the investors and the news stories never materialized. And a few days after their Cape Canaveral tour, the space shuttle Challenger exploded--effectively drawing everything there to a halt for the next few years, said Bender, now a 35-year-old Cleveland computer consultant.

“Mr. Singer speaks his mind,” he said. “That’s caused him some problems. He’s not a networker--he’s good at doing his own thing at his own place.”

Others agree.

“My heart’s with him. I like the guy,” said George Fischbeck, a former Los Angeles television weatherman who often saw Singer at the National Weather Service office.

“But Oscar is so deep into his theory that he just wants you to accept it. He can show it to you on paper. But let’s see if it works.”

Singer and Bender are trying one final strategy: the Internet.

Fourteen months ago Bender created the World Wide Web site www.weather.org for Singer.

To his surprise, nearly 33,000 people have clicked on his site so far. To his amazement, the National Weather Service has decided to provide a link from its own Web site to his.

Singer’s Internet site and its content have received top three-star ratings from meteorologists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

And the American Meteorological Society--which in the past all but ignored Singer--has invited him to submit material to be printed in one of its abstract publications.

Although recognition has come hesitantly--and belatedly, Singer says he isn’t upset at meteorologists who have rained on his parade for so long.

“But if I was in their position,” he said, “I’d probably have treated me the same. Or worse.”