For L.A. Weather Wonks, the Joy Is in the Details

It’s easy to be a weather wonk in, say, the Virgin Islands, where deadly hurricanes can threaten each fall, or in Eudora, Kan., where tornadoes are a worry each spring, with their power to stir the dust and mobile homes like the finger of a surly god.

In Southern California, it could be argued, serious weather-watching requires far more patience and an eye for subtlety. After all, the weather here is, for the most part, famously, boringly beautiful.

Nonetheless, hundreds of amateur meteorologists across Los Angeles spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on digital rain gauges, weather satellite uplinks and delicate analog barometers, often for no other reason than that they find weather, even Southern California weather, utterly fascinating--even after studying it for decades.

“I live for weather,” said William Reid. A grocery clerk and part-time weather consultant with a master’s degree in geography, Reid can check his records and tell you what happened in Woodland Hills, climatically speaking, every day between 1983 and this December.

The only reason he can’t tell you what happened in Woodland Hills for the last six weeks is that he moved to Agoura Hills.

Respectable storms like those that have walloped much of California recently are merely interesting anomalies to serious local amateurs, who are equally fascinated by a 2-degree temperature change from one suburban block to another.

An eclectic group that ranges from inquisitive grade school children with $1.39 plastic rain gauges to retirees with radio-transmitting anemometers, most of the weather watchers say that they have always been intrigued by cumulus clouds and fluctuations in the dew point. Many of them got really serious, though, when they realized that television and newspaper weather reports seldom seemed to describe what they were seeing out their front windows.

When Robert Footlik moved to the Santa Clarita Valley more than 10 years ago from the San Fernando Valley, the first thing he noticed was that there was no real-time weather reporting coming out of the area. The second thing he noticed was that “forecasters treated it very similarly to the San Fernando Valley--and it didn’t fit.”

“The daytime temperatures in the summer can be hotter,” said Footlik, a bioanalyst at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “In the wintertime, though, daytime highs can be significantly lower.”

A bit peeved that his new valley was not getting its weather due, Footlik, who speaks in the measured tone of a scientist, invested in what he called a “rather expensive” weather station. It includes thermometers, a heated rain gauge (handy when it snows), a device that measures the dew point, and another that measures relative humidity. It can detect wind speed and direction as well as barometric pressure. And it transmits the whole load of data to an indoor console.

Footlik doesn’t even have to step out the door of his Stevenson Ranch home.

(Meteorologists know, however that “ground truth”--the testimony of people who can go outside and say, “Yep, it’s snowing”--is crucial to accurate weather reporting.)

The National Weather Service doesn’t even have to pick up a phone. Footlik transfers the data from the console to a computer, and the Weather Service simply downloads the information from there--24 times a day, seven days a week.

If you switch on the Weather Channel and check out what’s happening in the Santa Clarita Valley, that information is coming from Footlik’s backyard. Or his roof.

“We have fancy radars and all the automated gear, but without the people . . . we wouldn’t have near the accuracy,” said Gary Ryan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

When the recent storms rolled through, the Oxnard office was receiving rain and temperature reports from 600 so-called spotters, and data on everything from wind velocity to humidity from 46 volunteer “cooperative observers” such as Footlik.

For every person with a setup like that of Footlik or Reid, though, there are probably dozens who head to the local hobby store, or who order a few meteoric doodads by mail because, well, if the weather is worth all that conversation. . . .

Tom Gray, a journalist, and his father-in-law, Gerald Bronson, a semiretired advertising executive and World War II fighter pilot, each have a couple of hundred dollars worth of digital equipment.

They do not keep elaborate records, but Gray, who lives in the Ventura County community of Oak Park, will tell you that his property received about 4 1/2 inches of rain Monday, and Bronson, of Sherman Oaks, will say that’s about 2 inches more than he got.

“It’s kind of the amateur scientist impulse, I guess,” Gray said. “You have your own little climate around your house. And the weather is still a type of science that an amateur can do well.”