Page 135 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

In the late 70’s, I flew to WGN Chicago to meet with John Coleman and Joe D’Leo
who were planning a national weather channel. I, along with a few other
meteorologists, met after the station signed off around midnight to make a
demonstration tape of this significant venture. Around 1980, John informed me that
Landmark Corporation had decided to finance the channel. My wife, Virginia, and I
flew to their new facility in Atlanta and witnessed how this was a monumental
achievement.

In discussing the operation of the Weather Channel, I told John that I thought that it
needed more than just maps, radar and satellite images. I suggested using a lot of video
of actual weather would relate more to viewers who were not meteorologically savvy.
Surprisingly, he saw no need for that.

While Channel 12 had always operated a weather radar for many years, we were more
comfortable with using the National Weather Service radars. They had one to the north
of Waycross, Georgia and one to the south in Daytona Beach. With these radars, we
had no problem with ground clutter that obscured data near the radar site. We also had
no equipment to maintain and update. We paid for a dedicated telephone connection to
both sites, stored the images on tape via a Scott time-lapse box and were able to show
the movement of the weather systems. We also had a dial-up fax system that we used to
select images from other parts of the U.S.

Over the years, we discovered there was sometimes a difference between actual
weather and the virtual (not real) weather as displayed by computer; in fact, its
portrayal can actually be false. Around 2002, we tried My-Cast. It was so bad because
it was showing our skies as overcast or raining when our skies were actually blue
because the seabreeze had pushed our clouds and rain well to the west of the city. It
used the MM5 forecast model. We learned that the WSI (Weather Services
International) GFS and NAM weather simulations usually didn’t show our hyper-local
weather. The rain display had been completely misleading when it comes to showing
rainfall totals. A classic example was on August 23, 2005, when it showed less than an
inch of rain in the Mandarin section of Jacksonville when over 2 inches had fallen.

Before the computer, I could easily write and draw on the weather maps with a Magic
Marker, but after 1981 my attempts to use the computer’s telestrator were fruitless. The
drawing either did not follow my motions, or the lines were too thin or faint to be of
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