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Packaging predictions Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell Holly Snell keeps track of the Doppler radar signal from Mount Ashland at the National Weather Service station near Medford's airport. By MELISSA MARTIN The weather station is like a factory. Information comes in - rain measurements taken by the soccer ball-like radar on top of Mount Ashland, photos of weather patterns beamed from a satellite 22,300 miles in space and phone conversations with rural weather watchers. Meteorologists turn the information into a product - forecasts used by pilots, commercial fishermen on the Oregon Coast, crews fighting the Quartz Fire, orchardists who need to prepare for the first frost and folks wanting to know if it will rain on their camping trip. In Medford, the weather factory is on Cirrus Drive near the airport. It's staffed by 26 people working in shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "If you put 10 forecasters in the same room, they would come out with 10 different forecasts," said Roger Williams, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in Medford. When the weather forecasters are wrong, everybody gets upset, even the meteorologists. "We beat ourselves up more than we get beat up by the public," Williams said. On a recent morning, when one forecaster opened the back door and announced it was sprinkling, everyone in the room left their computer screens to walk outside. "We were right," one of them said. Modern meteorologists have a wealth of information at their fingertips. With a click of the mouse they can look at a satellite photo of the source of the storm in the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. In another window, they can collect National Aviation Weather Center data from Kansas City, information that's useful to pilots about turbulence, icing or visibility. The wild card in all of this information gathering process is which computer model meteorologists choose to build their forecasts. These mathematical models try to mimic the physics of the atmosphere, Williams said. They are created at the National Weather Service headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. In addition to depending on computers, the Medford crews send up hydrogen-filled air balloons twice a day to collect atmospheric readings. The weather staff also depends on "ground truth," temperatures, precipitation and wind speeds called in by some 400 volunteers in seven counties in Southern Oregon and Northern California. But before the 1980s, meteorologists couldn't communicate with the rest of the world so easily. Williams keeps around as a reminder of the past the old Weather Surveillance Radar 57, so primitive that it picked up flights of migrating geese on the screen. At least every hour, meteorologists had to make adjustments, readings and drawings, plus record radio broadcasts. "It was a very laborious process," Williams said. Today, it takes only a flip of a switch and the temperature, forecast, history, highs and lows, monthly precipitation totals and sunrise and sunset are all recorded by a computer voice nicknamed "Paul." Paul's loop recording of weather data info is available by calling 779-5990. Once the factory creates its product, it must distribute it to the consumer via the news media, the Internet, weather radio and other outlets, Williams said. While modern meteorologists rely on the information highway, computers will never completely replace humans when it comes to predicting the weather, Williams said. "It will always take the human element to decipher the information," Williams said. Reach reporter Melissa Martin at 776-4497, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.