TUNGSTEN VALLEY - Our weather and climate situation can sometimes, perhaps, feel like too much to bear. As we obsessively monitor temperature, humidity, and wind speed here in the Peak to Peak, here’s some comic relief. It’s a true story...
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TUNGSTEN VALLEY - Our weather and climate situation can sometimes, perhaps, feel like too much to bear. As we obsessively monitor temperature, humidity, and wind speed here in the Peak to Peak, here’s some comic relief.
It’s a true story illustrating one of the silliest ideas that makes the rounds: that the government uses weather radars to generate storms.
Raise curtain: Beckley, West Virginia, 1979. I was a teenager who’d just started with the Department of Commerce’s Boulder radio research laboratory. We had a 16,000-pound (that’s not a typo) mobile, computer-controlled, state-of-the-art spectrum measurement system for troubleshooting radio interference problems.
Pioneered by Hewlett-Packard in a joint government-industry design project, it was the precursor of every modern spectrum analyzer. Just one small example of how the government’s scientific work has paid off for America.
We’d driven our system from Boulder to Beckley to measure the emissions of a brand-new National Weather Service WSR-74C radar there. The measurement spanned an immense spectrum swath; there was time to kill while it ran.
Strolling through the radar’s control building, I noticed an unmarked Mason jar sitting on a high shelf, with what looked like water inside. I asked the Meteorologist in Charge (MiC) about it.
“Ah, that.” He put a hand to his temple. “That’s some local moonshine.”
I probably looked nonplussed. Growing up in Colorado, I’d never seen the stuff.
The MiC went on. “When the radar was getting built a couple years ago, we got a knock on the door one day. It was a local farmer. He wondered about the radar, and we showed him around.
“At the end of the tour, he asked, ‘Can you fellers make it hail?’ We said, no, sir, the radar just watches the weather, it can’t change it any.
“But he wouldn’t have it. He said, ‘I know you gover-mint fellers have to say that. But I need hail, for my crop insurance. If you’ll hail me out, I’ll bring you my best ’shine every month.’
“Time passed and the radar got commissioned. The local paper ran a story about the christening. And just afterward, wouldn’t you know, we got hit by the most hellatious hail storm in memory around here.
“Now, we’ll never convince him we didn’t hail him out. And true to his word, he brings us his moonshine every month.” “Good hooch?” I asked. “He knows his way around a still. We can’t accept gifts but he’d be insulted if we turned him away. So we shelve it over there.”
Returning to the present, some people still think radars modify the weather. Never mind that a radar puts less average power into the air than a cellular base station, and that if radars could make storms, then cell towers would be pumping out hurricanes in Iowa. And Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile would be cleaning up in the liquor business, from people collecting all that juicy insurance money. Oh, humanity.
The author can be contacted at Peak2PeakClimate@gmail.com.
