Tag: meteorology

The Dean of weather forecasting

celebrating a legacy

I was a highly impressed freshman meteorology student when I first met the dean of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Charles Hosler. He regaled us with stories from when he was a professor of meteorology in the 1950s and 60s, conducting then-cutting-edge experiments in weather modification. He confessed that if it rained after an experiment, it was tremendously difficult to tell if was due to the experiment, or it would have rained anyway! So the experiments were abandoned, but not before he had aroused fierce opposition from local farmers who attributed everything they didn’t like about the weather to him and Penn State—even accusing the university of flying a black airplane at night to seed the clouds when no one would notice. Once he was even shot at.

Dean Hosler, as I knew him, died last November at the age of 99. Today, I attended the Celebration of Charles Hosler’s Penn State Life and Legacy on campus, in the building that used to house the weather tower on the eighth floor when I was a student (and which is connected to what is now named the Hosler Building).

In the college’s announcement of his passing, it noted that “Hosler was one of the early titans of weather forecasting. He created one of the first television weather shows when he started broadcasting weather forecasts from Penn State in 1957, with a goal of providing more accurate weather forecasts for Pennsylvanians.”

Dr. Hosler received many awards for his research and administrative excellence over his long career. After serving 20 years as dean of the Earth and Mineral Sciences College, he became Penn State’s senior vice president for research and the dean of the Graduate School, and acting executive vice president and provost before retiring in 1992. I was glad to have been inspired by his example and earn my degree under his leadership in the atmospheric sciences.

Why, back in MY day..!

another heartwarming episode of “Life as I Remember it Ought to Have Been”

Today is another day of cancelled school while the populace waits for its hopeful interrupting snowfall. In anticipation, the streets have already been sprayed with snow-melting solution, the public works guys are counting overtime hours, and it’s a great excuse for a surprise holiday.

Remote workers: you got nothing.

But back in MY day, an accumulating snow, much less a forecast of it, was no reason for changing the day’s plans.

(Disclaimer: my bachelor’s degree is in forecast meteorology; and this is no bash against my brother and sister prognosticators!)

But as I was saying, back in MY day, things were different.

I have a vivid memory from a particular wintry day back in the early 60s, when Good Ol’ Bus 4 ambled up our unnamed road to our farm in rural Moore Township, Pennsylvania. Cold. Windy. Snow covering the yard, feeding troughs, fields, road and everything. Me, bundled in my red coat with the hood up and tied tight round my face with a threaded shoestring, wearing tall, black rubber boots, each with a half-dozen railroad-track latches, and clutching my metal Donald Duck lunchbox with matching thermos inside, I stood dutifully next to our mailbox held aloft by a red, white and blue painted plank figure of Uncle Sam.

The bus arrived just as expected, I giant-stepped into the maw of the yellow beast, and it trundled its load of captive minors toward another day’s sentence in jail (which today might be called “The Learning Facility.”)

But in just another two hundred feet or so, the bus lodged itself in a blustering snowdrift that had dammed the roadway between our barns. “Schlegel,” the bus driver, gave it the old college try to plow his way through, but today the game appeared to be already decided with the low score of Stubborn Snowdrift: 1, Good Ol’ Bus 4: 0.

I quickly and opportunistically offered to hop off and go back to the house and tell my parents. But Schlegel wouldn’t have it. With an order to his charges to “Stay on the bus!” he abandoned us to trudge back to the house. Inside, my parents allowed him to use the party-line telephone to call the school (what were they thinking!?) and let them know we were stuck in the snowbank between a pair of barns isolated in the backcountry wintry wastes.

Eventually, Schlegel returned and resumed his seat at the front of the bus, and closed the bifold door. And there we all sat in the damp cold on the hard bench seats. And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And then, in the distance, appeared an growing yellow smudge amid the swirling snow: Rescue!

Another bus crawled toward us from the other side of the world, turned itself around, backed up to “Our Drift,” and invitingly opened its door to the frigid wilderness.

With Schlegel stomping a path through the monstrous frozen whitecap, each of us snow-hopped across to Mean Ol’ Bus 6, retook our seats, and resumed the long, cold trek to No Excuses Consolidated Elementary School.

I couldn’t possibly tell you what I learned that day in class, but the memory of that singular adventure is a permanent fixture of what happened back in MY day!

Note: I sure wish that my dad had hustled outside with his Argus and taken a Kodachrome of that stuck school bus, but he stayed inside while all us kiddos built character. Instead, I offer these photos from another winter’s day when the Township’s bulldozer eventually got us plowed out—after we had run out of food, and my dad had skied into town to fetch some groceries.

Duo anniversary celebrations

a nostalgic night dedicated to two loves!

For our 44th wedding anniversary, I escorted my lovely date to a reception honoring another milestone celebration: the 50th Anniversary of Penn State’s Campus Weather Service, in which I served as Thursday night forecaster while a senior meteorology student.

Our 44th wedding anniversary portrait.

We visited the sixth floor of the Walker Building, which houses the meteorology department. The wall where dozens of newly-generated paper weather charts had been tacked up every hour, and the separate enclosed room that housed the noisy teletype and facsimile machines have vanished. (No surprise there!) As befits the world-renown university program, the Joel N. Myers Weather Center (named for its famous student and the founder of Accuweather) is now equipped with all the state-of-the-art-and-science tech. (I was fortunate in the 70s that Joel was still teaching for my first forecasting course—and to attend his self-professed “famous tornado lecture.”)

A historical pic of my Meteo Dept. Head, Professor Blackadar, demonstrating the cool tech of the facsimile machine; old weather geeks from the Class of ’78; and a hand-plotted weather map.

In the days before satellite imagery, 24-hour video feeds, and endless data streaming, we received the raw stats through a monstrous teletype machine, plotted each weather station’s data in a mix of symbols and numbers on a map, and then drew in isobars, areas of precipitation and frontal boundaries. Once plotted, analyzed, and interpreted, we’d hand-write a forecast for the subscribing radio stations, pick up the phone and call it in.

Here I am warning about the exploding fireball about to hit Beaver Stadium in the green screen studio. (Actually, it’s the fierceness of the stadium lighting!)

Today’s students have the opportunity to polish their forecasting skills along with live broadcasting techniques in a cooperative venture with Weather World on PCN cable TV.

We enjoyed Penn State Creamery ice cream, a tour of the studios, and running into two of my classmates from 1978. I donated an autographed copy of Kaleidoscope Sky, my 2007 book on atmospheric optical phenomena—the fascinating varieties of rainbows, halos, auroras, mirages, etc.

Accuweather’s operating floor where meteorologists generate consensus forecasts; one of its several broadcast studios; and the control room.

We were also treated to a tour of nearby Accuweather’s World Headquarters (just down the street from my office in State College). While I took a different career route from my initial plan of synoptic forecasting, it was exciting to see the incredible progress of the science and technologies from my undergraduate days.

And, after you’ve been married for 44 years to such a sweet and understanding wife, and she gamely accompanies you in a night dedicated to one of your other loves, let’s just say that it’s good that there were also cookies and ice cream!

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