A Great Time to Be a Weather Fan…

I sat today tracking the development of Tropical Storm Edouard in the Gulf of Mexico and mused on the evolution of information available to weather enthusiasts about such systems in just my lifetime.

The first tropical cyclone that I remember tracking happened in September 1971. Hurricane Edith moved through the Caribbean, crossed the Yucatan, made landfall in Mexico and turned back northeastward across the Gulf. It crossed the Louisiana Coast east of Cameron and eventually crossed Central Alabama on September 18th.

My tools then were a regular AM radio that you could tune to WWL in New Orleans, the old recorded forecast line at the National Weather Service office on West Oxmoor Road and the ATIS broadcast on a VHF frequency from the Birmingham Municipal Airport. The ATIS, or Automated Terminal Information System broadcast the latest surface observations and other airport information on a continuous loop. It was updated at least once per hour, or generally when a new SA (surface observation) was issued. Oh yes, and my World Book Atlas, where I tracked the positions.

As we went through the 70s, things began to slowly Radio was still the main source for information through the first half of the decade, but by 1977, we had NOAA Weatheradio. And my dad was able to bring discarded NOAA Weather Wire material home from his job at the Birmingham News.

By the 1980, the best source beyond the NOAA WR was to actually go to the NWS Office and gather info. Looking up data on the AFOS terminals seemed space age. Now, there is probably more computing power in my iPod than there was in the old computers at the NWS. Things really changed for the better in the summer of 1982 when The Weather Channel went on the air. John Hope became the go to source for information. By the late 80s, I acquired a Telex terminal with modem and found the joys of dial up weather.

Then came Compuserv and the other dial up services. They would be dwarfed by the enormity of the internet by the middle 90s. Now, almost any piece of weather information is available to me today in real time or near real time. Add in webcams and blogs, and the information sharing is amazing. It is a great time to be a weather fan!

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