Natural Phenomenon: Weathermen work around the clock to keep public informed, safe

BROWNSVILLE - The ordinary thermometer, anemometer, hygrometer and barometer are long gone.

The National Weather Service station in Brownsville is located in a sturdy building surrounded by smaller buildings that are loaded with sophisticated, sensitive instruments, in the shadow of a Doppler radar dome and a satellite dish on the outskirts of the airport here.

Inside, there's a chilly room humming with computer servers and data storage units with servers to back-up the backup servers.

The instruments, computers, weather satellites and radar are the "brains" of the weather service, meteorologist Barry Goldsmith said Thursday.

"If this had a stroke," he said, motioning to the computers, "we'd be dead."

The 14 NWS meteorologists and nine support staff work here year ‘round - 24 hours a day, seven days a week - gathering data that, in one way or another, influences everyone's lives.

Most of the time, the work is routine, Goldsmith said. While hurricanes and tornadoes are spectacular weather phenomena, thunderstorms and flooding are much more common and dangerous.

The weather station staff launches instrument-packed weather balloons every day at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. to measure the air pressure, wind, humidity, and temperature. These launches are synchronized with balloon launches at all 125 other weather stations in the country, to take a weather "snapshot" of the nation's climate at the same time, twice a day.

That data is transferred electronically to the NWS computers outside Washington, D.C., which process the information to create weather "models," which in turn are used to tell the public if it's going to rain, if it'll be windy or cold, or if there's a chance of more dramatic weather in the form of floods or tornadoes, and sometimes hurricanes and tropical storms.

"All the data from all the locations contribute to the weather," Goldsmith said, adding that weather is the common denominator in everyone's lives.

The station's work area is a U-shaped configuration of desks, arranged below a large flat-panel television, tuned to The Weather Channel, where meteorologists "see all that information that's being processed out there," he said.

Meteorologist Mike Castillo had five computer monitors in front of him, displaying a variety of weather data and comparing the instrument readings and satellite images to develop and refine the weather forecast.

In addition to the local Rio Grande Valley weather, on Thursday it was Tropical Storm Gustav - now Hurricane Gustav - churning in the Caribbean, newly christened Tropical Storm Hanna and at least two tropical waves in the Atlantic that could develop into tropical depressions and perhaps more serious storms. In this case, weather systems over and approaching the Valley could influence where Gustav tracked, and how strong it could become.

Castillo, a Houston native, arrived at the NWS Brownsville station in 1999. A 1993 graduate of Texas A&M with a bachelor of science degree, he said that Dr. Steve Lyons, the Weather Channel's hurricane expert, was one of his professors.

He became interested in weather from living on the Gulf Coast, he said, and admitted to early "nerdy-ness" by tracking Hurricane Allen in 1980, when he was 11 years old.

Hurricane Dolly on July 23 was the first hurricane for meteorologist Geoff Bogorad, who said he's been a meteorologist in Brownsville for three years. He has worked for the NWS in Albuquerque and New Orleans - "before Katrina" - and is also an Aggie. Dolly was a stressful time for him, he said, because he was worried about his family.

Bogorad pegs his interest in weather to the day when he was a 6-year- old watching a thunderstorm and saw lightning split a tree in his front yard.

"Why did that happen?" he said he remembers thinking at the time. That curiosity evolved into multiple daily phone calls to the local weather station to check the temperature, watching it rise and fall.

His hobby turned into his profession, Bogorad said, "because it changes every day and science is fascinating."

Hurricane Dolly was not an ordinary day at the weather station, Goldsmith said.

Thirteen of the 14 meteorologists and other technicians were on duty. The overnight staff came in early and stayed overnight.

On July 23, while Dolly battered the Valley, meteorologists were taking reports from observers, emergency management officials, the U.S. Coast Guard and private citizens and providing rapid updates to the forecast, Goldsmith said.

Using wind and rain data from instruments - "what's happening out there" - the station tracked the storm and compiled frequent reports to English- and Spanish-language media, over the Internet and to the weather radio operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the weather service's parent agency.

Goldsmith said, "We put out special reports as soon as the information was received and analyzed."

Beyond the instruments and data, the NWS' mission is people, Goldsmith, a 23-year NWS veteran, said. The instruments and computers may be the brains, but the human staff is the heart and soul, using the data that's collected to protect people and property.

"We'll still be needed because people need to understand the why and how, beyond the numbers," he said. The NWS' mission is shifting to interpreting the instrument data for health and safety.

The state of Florida used weather service data to impose stricter building codes so homes and offices have a better chance of withstanding storms, and therefore provide better protection for people. Buildings there that are "built to code" should be able to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, he said.

To him, Haiti has some of the worst weather in the world, Goldsmith said, because the island's infrastructure is so poor and any storm that strikes there can be disastrous and fatal. To illustrate his point, he noted that Gustav reportedly killed dozens of Haitians while there were no deaths in the Rio Grande Valley directly linked to Hurricane Dolly.

The Brownsville weather station is not immune from dangerous weather. The station's break room is a small windowless interior area that is built with reinforcing rebar that can protect the building's occupants from the strongest tornadoes.

The weather station, located in a low-lying area, has an evacuation plan for Category 3 or stronger hurricane, Goldsmith said. Such a storm would send the meteorologists heading north and west, "probably to San Antonio," Goldsmith said.