The Good Old Days

By Bill Korbel

Sitting in the weather center surrounded by not one, not two, but seven computers, I started thinking how my profession has changed in the 35 years I've been involved in the at times humbling task of forecasting the weather.

My first job was as a 2nd Lieutenant weather forecaster at Griffiss AFB near Rome NY.  We had a state of the art weather operation for the time with clattering teletype machines, like the one in the photo to the left, and weather fax machines.  These were diabolical monsters that printed on an eighteen inch wide roll of wet paper.  They often jammed and it was not uncommon to get into work only to find 8 hours worth of weather charts crushed into a useless mass of paper.  Did I mention there were no computers?   The only computers around were the size of a refrigerator and had less computing power then the average cell phone.  We did have some very crude satellite images like this one taken by an early TIROS weather satellite.  If you look carefully you can see the coast of New England and Nova Scotia. 

With this crude equipment we still managed to put together some very good short range forecasts for say the next 24 to 36 hours.  Beyond that, it was pretty much a guess.  Now of course, we have more information then we can possibly use and the forecasts are much, much better.  A lot of people still complain about our accuracy, but we now can give forecasts for fours days with the accuracy of one day forecasts back then.  We can even pick up decent patterns up through 7 and 10 days, a forecast that 2nd Lt Korbel could only dream about. Perhaps 30 years from now, our current News12 weather station will seem as quaint as my old Air Force version.  No doubt forecasts will be even more reliable.  I will however wager that they still won't be perfect and probably never will be.