The Weatherman Goes to War

Reconnaissance flyers reported snow over the Leipzig area. But the big bombers took off on schedule that February morning. By the time they began their target runs over Leipzig's aircraft plants, it was sparklingly clear. For five more days the skies around Leipzig were blue and the ground was blackened by Allied bombs. The Air Forces weatherman had been dead right.

Analogues. This up-to-the-minute forecasting of weather 400 miles from the nearest Allied observation stations was not done by aching joints or a wet finger to the wind. It was done by long looking at past weather maps -- called analogues -- which the Army Air Forces had ordered two years before.

Digging into old files, the U.S. Weather Bureau had reconstructed maps of Northern Hemisphere weather, one for each day of the past 45 years. The task was laborious and expensive. Weather Bureau files, records of Allied Governments, all available ship logs were combed to reconstruct the temperature and pressure at 1300 GMT (3 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time) every day since 1899. The observations of peacetime German and Italian weathermen went into the maps, too.

Weathermen would have liked to go back even further, but data was lacking.

Now, military weathermen in Britain sketch a current map and in Washington, an International Business Machine shuffles through the old maps every day, digs out analogous weather conditions. Forecasters see what happened next under the same conditions, make their forecasts on the premise that like conditions produce like results.

Russia is the only other nation to develop analogues and put them to similar use. When a high U.S. weather officer visited Russia in 1942, he found parallel developments, forthwith began American-Russian meteorological collaboration. Later a Russian mission, including Lieut. Colonel S. T. Pagava, chief long-range forecaster, came to the U.S., traded more technical information. Now the British Meteorologic Office and the Admiralty have sets of U.S. archive charts, and duplicates are on file in every key weather station throughout the Allied world.

Weather Is a Weapon. The American military weather staff has many secret techniques in addition to the analogue. Head man in Britain is a professional army officer of 34 who studied at Caltech, now has on his staff one of his former professors. Their coordinated report is the first thing Major General Frederick L. Anderson, U.S. Deputy Chief of Air Operations, demands each morning. The head weatherman is also attached to the Supreme Allied Commander's headquarters and, in daily conferences with the British, contributes to the master report of Army, Navy and Air Forces experts for General Eisenhower and his staff.*

* Britain's own expert is 32-year-old Sir Nelson King Johnson of the air Ministry. He and his staff were consutled for every Commando raid and for the landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. Sir Nelson believes weather secrets are hidden in the upper air, uses a special balloon apparatus for readings up to 50,000 feet.

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