Page 52 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

As Weather Observer at Turner Field, I read the weather instruments and logged the
readings on a form called WBAN. The letters stand for Weather-Bureau-Army-Navy
which was the official record of the weather for that day. I would then go to a teletype
machine and type the coded report onto a strip of ticker tape. I would place the tape
onto a box that would transmit it through a telephone line to a weather center when the
weather center transmitted Turner Field’s call letters, TRF. We had 8 different weather
observers to cover 24 hours, 7 days a week. Everyone received a score at the end of the
month based on the accuracy of their reports. Computation and entry errors were called
discrepancies. Having been an excellent math and science student in High school, my
score was often around 98%.

I enjoyed talking about the weather with our forecasters. Lt. Clark taught me a lot about
forecasting and meteorology. We also had one of the first radars used at weather
stations. It was an AN/APQ-13 radar developed by Bell Laboratories for B-29s in the
Pacific during the war. Often when I saw distant lightning at night, I would turn on the
radar and try to detect the rain by rotating the antenna and adjusting the tuning. One
night I picked up a thunderstorm and discovered it was over Fitzgerald, Georgia while
we had a clear, starry night in Albany.

CHAPTER 14 - College Life in Oklahoma
One day, Captain Marvin Lutz, who was in charge of the weather station, called me
into his office for a review. He told me that I was rated “excellent”, and that he was
recommending me to a new meteorology program at Oklahoma A&M College, now
Oklahoma State University. The Air Force assembled professors from schools like
UCLA, the University of Chicago, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. The course was called the Intermediate Meteorology School. Classes
included climatology, map analysis, and meteorology. Each of us was taught math at a
level higher than our high school education. I received 30 semester hours of college
credit, plus 3 additional hours credit for a Synoptic Meteorology course I took at
Oklahoma A&M College.

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