Watching the rain come

We are supposed to have some thunderstorms today as a cold front passes by. Thanks to the internet, I can track the storm on the radar as it approaches; almost neighborhood by neighborhood.

I must admit that I’m a little conflicted by all this. Back in the day, the TV weatherman would tell us on the local news at night that we would have rain the next day. Unless I was working the morning shift at the TV station that would be the last update I heard before the storm arrived.

Back then, the hour by hour forecast was not all that accurate so it was pretty much a guessing game as to whether or not it would be raining at a given hour during the day. So, before leaving the house, I’d look out the window to the west and if it looked threatening I’d grab my raincoat and umbrella.

The usual outcome of this was that I would get a soaking somewhere between the parking lot and the station. I swear that I had the worst luck when it came to getting rained on. Oh MAN! If only I had a weather radar unit in my car. In case you are thinking “Why don’t you keep an umbrella in your car Dummy,” I tried to but somehow it was always temporarily away from the car in the house or the station.

I do have that problem mostly solved these days. Right now there are no fewer than three umbrellas on the floor of my car behind the driver’s seat. Three or more hang on hooks in the foyer closet at home and I even have one in my courier bag that I carry to work. But, even with all these precautions, I still get a little damp from time to time. Don’t say it; I’m just a big drip, wet behind the ears, even! Sigh, that seems to be my lot in life.

One would think that with thousands of flight hours in my log book that I would have a lot of experience with airborne weather radar. But I can probably count the hours flying with radar onboard on the fingers of both of my hands. To add insult to injury, nearly all of those flight hours were in severe clear weather conditions and all I used the radar for was to spot the rivers and lakes on the surface as I flew over the countryside.

This meant that I had to rely on the air traffic controllers to keep me out of the worst of the storms when flying on instruments as only larger commercial aircraft had their own systems. Those professionals usually did a great job keeping me and the thunderstorms separate. The problem was that their prime job was to keep the airplanes separate from each other and on really stormy days, they had to operate their radars in a mode that suppressed the display of the storms. Once or twice that resulted in white knuckles in the middle of copper green clouds. Just in case you didn’t know, if the sky turns copper green, seek shelter immediately. Not an easy thing to do at 7,000 feet.

I often wished that we had radar at the radio stations where I worked so that I could give a play by play of the storm as it streaked across the listener area. But until digital weather radar came along, the quality of the radar display would have prevented it even if we did. Plus those weather radars were far too expensive for broadcasting. Not to mention that special FCC licensing required to operate a ground based radar system.

So how did we do real time weather reporting on the radio back in the day? We went out into the storm in two way radio equipped news cars and reported conditions back to the news room or actually going live from the field. We didn’t do that for every mom and pop rain shower but we did in major weather events, particularly in the winter with snow and ice storms.

Those were, all hands on deck events for the staff that was in the station at the time. Even an inch or less of snow paralyzed the city which had absolutely no snow removal equipment at the time. I can remember several times in the late 70s, when I was in the station and the news crews were trapped in their homes by the snow. The news director would throw a set of keys to a news car and ask me to get out there. The irony was not lost on me as I struggled from bottleneck to bottleneck on the roads around the city broadcasting for everyone to stay off the road. I guess everyone was in a rush to get their bread, milk and eggs. Don’t ask; it’s a southern thing.

Today it is much different, the city and state can keep the major thoroughfares moving but the drivers on the neighborhood streets are on their own.

Image courtesy of wunderground.com. I just looked at the radar, the squall line is 50 miles away and the leading edge has some red colored radar returns which indicate heavy rain and a severe thunderstorm watch has been issued. The rain is supposed to be here in two hours. They say 100% chance of rain. The dogs went out a short while ago. I need to get them in before Chester freaks out and hides under the shed. If he does that, then I’ll get wet again. Oh MY!