Word: meteorologist
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...appearances of a very normal storm as it came across the Pacific," said National Weather Service Meteorologist Richard Wagoner. But the storm was far from normal, and so was its nightmarish impact. The extraordinarily heavy rains that poured down on Northern California last week-in some areas, more than a foot in 32 hours-followed weeks of rain that had saturated the porous clay earth. On Monday, mountainsides began turning to mud, flowing in thick torrents over towns and rural houses in their paths. In wealthy Marin Bounty, just north of San Francisco, more han 80 houses were destroyed...
This much is history: the new President, flying in from his warmer clime, was inaugurated in freezing Washington amid water rationing in the unseasonably warm West, crippling natural gas shortages in the Northeast, and record-breaking cold as far South as Miami. The year was 1977, and a Washington meteorologist said: "Jimmy Carter's first confrontation as President will not be with the Russians, but with the weather." Just to assure that Ronald Reagan is similarly humbled by elements beyond his control, nature has conjured up another trial by ice and drought for a new Administration...
...voyage left shattering death and destruction in its wake. Hurricane Allen brought savage 185 m.p.h. winds and 20-ft. waves. It wiped out most of the Caribbean banana crop, demolished thousands of homes and killed more than 100 people before its final landfall in Texas. Said Noel Risnychok, a meteorologist at Miami's National Hurricane Center, as the winds scythed through the normally placid Caribbean: "Allen has the potential to be the most devastating storm of the century...
Seated at a video console, the meteorologist intently watches the splashes of color as they flash across the screen. Spotting some possibly ominous patches, he zeroes in on one of the red and yellow areas. Then, fiddling with the controls, he orders up another display, showing tiny arrows circling counterclockwise and swirling ever closer in a tightening loop. After checking the coordinates on a map superimposed on his screen, the operator telephones an alert for the threatened area to the National Weather Service: a tornado may be about to strike...
What caused the shift in winds? Meteorologist Jerome Namias of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography -who had correctly predicted a wetter-than-normal winter for California-believes that it was somehow related to an increase of 1° to 2° C (2° to 4° F) in ocean surface temperatures between California and Hawaii and unusually cold temperatures in waters in the central Pacific north of Hawaii. Though Namias cannot precisely explain the mechanism, he says that as the air passes over the water and warms up, the newly acquired heat influences the direction of the jet stream...