Page 98 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

for each broadcast. Beginning in September, the news was expanded to 30-minutes and
I could use some of my Space-view weather maps that had been printed by Miller
Press. After a few weeks of drawing fronts and writing temperatures with a black
Magic Marker, I studied the map for a way to improve the report. Since the map was
printed on light blue paper to reduce the glare to the TV cameras, the thought came to
me that I could paint clouds on it with white Tempera (poster) paint. This would give
the clouds a raised appearance over the map. I had seen the first satellite pictures when
working with the Weather Bureau, so I gathered the latest weather reports and used my
knowledge of weather systems to create the world’s first “simulated” national satellite
pictures in 1962.

The was just 2 years after the first U.S. weather satellite, TIROS, had been launched,
and 4 years before regular satellite images were first distributed by the government.
These pictures were only mosaics, a group of smaller adjacent pictures because the first
satellites were in low polar orbits. Each picture was only a few states wide, taken as the
low polar-orbiting satellite passed from north to south or south to north over a rotating
earth. We received these pictures on the newsroom’s Wire-photo/fax, issued by the
Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA). By 1970, they had assembled
a worldwide mosaic where I could show the disastrous East Pakistan (Bangladesh)
cyclone that killed more than 200,000 people. The ultimate, a global view of weather
systems were not available until the geostationary satellites were placed in orbits
22,300 miles above the earth in 1974 and 1975.

When I started my television career, news broadcasts were much shorter. The evening
newscasts had been only 15 minutes long - five minutes of news with Bill Grove, five
minutes of sports with Dick Stratton, and finally my five minutes of weather. This was
followed by only 15 minutes of national news - CBS news with Douglas Edwards. In
September 1962, the local newscast was expanded to 30 minutes and called Newsnight.
That’s when Walter Cronkite took over the CBS Evening News.

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