December 3, 1988 -- I walked into my very first weather office. It was on the Navy base located at the airport in Naples, Italy. The concept of a paperless weather office wasnt even thought of yet. Between the wall of fax charts and constant noise of multiple teletypes, paper was everywhere. Every 12 hours, we would plot a surface weather map consisting of maybe 200 individual weather observations across Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and eastern Atlantic. The task took anywhere from 2 to 3 hours, depending on how fast you were and the other demands of the job (hourly weather observations, trimming and posting the fax charts, organizing what seemed like miles of yellow teletype paper, etc.). I used to dream that maybe someone, someday would invent a computer that could plot those station circles for us so we wouldnt have to do it by hand. It was a chore. Well, that computer has since been invented, and now we dont even print out surface maps at all. We can view them on a computer screen every hour, zoom in, zoom out, overlay the isobars, the fronts, the highs and lows, satellite imagery, whatever we want. Its something we simply take for granted nowadays. But sometimes I think back to those times it was an hours-long task to put together a surface analysis. (MAR)
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:11:48 +0000
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