www.montereycountyweekly.com february 16-22, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 21 nation meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey region, comprising 11 counties from Napa to Santa Clara to Monterey, home to a population of about 8 million. He deployed to San Francisco to team up with its emergency operations team during some of the most intense January conditions, and says in one day during the deluge, the team did 19 briefings for emergency officials. Calls come in overnight, particularly during severe weather conditions. The regional NWS office has been based in Monterey for 29 years, on the U.S. Navy’s annex property behind Monterey Regional Airport, next door to the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (the main Naval Support Activity Monterey installation is where the Naval Postgraduate School is located). The Weather Service relocated here in 1994 after its lease in Redwood City was up, and inked a 30-year lease with the Navy for $1 a year; that lease was just renewed last year for another 30 years. The walls of the Monterey office are flanked with framed photos taken by meteorologists of various sites within the region, and all say something about the weather: cattle grazing in clear conditions on Mount Toro, vineyards in South Monterey County, flooded streets near San Jose in 2017, pellets of hail 6 inches deep on the beach in Marina in 2000. “They are pictures of weather, but they are more a reminder of the population we serve,” Garcia says. That includes roughly 8 million people, as well as eight airports, MRY, SFO and SJC among them. The National Weather Service has been serving the public since 1872 when it was established by Congress and signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant. While the speed at which the measurements are collected and reported has changed, the premise remains the same: Take records like temperature and precipitation, and based on data, predict what is coming next. Today, the Bay Area region’s NWS office relies mostly on a supercomputer in Silver Spring, Maryland for data. A satellite dish out back, outside of the Monterey airport, takes a feed and real-time weather information shows up on monitors inside, alongside local news and the Weather Channel. Supercomputing means there’s not much data collected onsite, and the area known as the “instrument garden” is largely defunct. It’s all relayed to the public in the form of a weather forecast, including a narrative written by a rotating staff of meteorologists. On Feb. 13, as cold temperatures settled in, it offered some advice: “Dress in layers and wear a hat that covers the ears. Pay special attention to children and the elderly, who are more vulnerable to the cold.” By Jan. 31, when Garcia and his crew have had enough time to catch their breath and invite the Weekly for a tour of the NWS office, there’s still a Christmas tree standing, a sign of how much they had to hustle amid the winter storms. “Now it’s a Valentine’s Day tree,” says Warren Blier, science and operations officer. Blier and Garcia spoke to the Weekly about what goes into predicting the weather, and how the world of meteorology is changing. Weekly: The weather forecast is one week out at a time. Why one week? Blier: It has to do with how we forecast the weather and what we are capable of. Years ago, I would talk to students and say, “You want to cut school and go to the beach tomorrow, how do you make the decision?” It used to be, “I look at the newspaper.” Now it’s, “I look at the app.” Underlying that nice, friendly customer view is ultimately a problem of geophysical fluid dynamics—it’s taking the three-dimensional atmosphere around the planet, cutting it up into little pieces, defining the initial state of those billions of little pieces at a time and recalculating the structure of the atmosphere into the future. One of the things is probability. This takes really high-end supercomputing capacity to do. It’s something referred to as the butterfly effect—the idea that a little change in something can have a big impact as you go out in time. There is nothing to that—whether or not a butterfly flaps its wings is not going to have an impact. We are making numerical approximations, going “It’s hard to quantify lives saved.” NWS Lead Meteorologist Roger Gass works on the latest forecast at the regional office in Monterey. Warning Coordination Meteorologist Brian Garcia discusses the forecast for airport sites. The region includes eight airports. daniel dreifuss daniel dreifuss
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