Going off-line to chat about weather
Dozens of regulars on a popular forum gather in Phila. to talk rain, snow, global warming.
Michael Goss, a.k.a. MallowTheCloud, learned something quite astonishing this weekend about a person he knew only as "arlwx."
"I didn't know she was a female," said Goss, a student at the University of Washington, who is a meteorological intern at the National Weather Service office in Portland, Ore.
As it turns out, Victoria Smith, who is admittedly well past her college years, is indeed a female.
"Arlwx" is the alias she uses when she posts on Easternuswx, one of the weather world's most popular chat boards, and she is well aware that weather is a predominantly male universe.
Goss and Smith, a government accountant who works in the Arlington, Va., area, were among about 85 forum participants who have gathered at a Philadelphia airport hotel for Eastern's three-day conference.
Ordinarily, the chat-board participants are prone to acerbic, if not jugular, exchanges about the weather, yet yesterday they appeared to be the very models of civility.
"When we meet, people are totally different," said Randy "stormtracker" Legette, a computer specialist who is a conference organizer. "People have online personalities and their normal personalities. Here, they have their normal personalities."
The conferees came from New England and throughout the Mid-Atlantic, which dominate the chat board. Legette said Philadelphia was chosen because it is roughly the geographic center of the posters.
This is the slow season for the chat board, which is owned by Mach Ten Computer Products, a Manchester, Md., computer/network sales and service company. About 5,000 people post on the chat board, and about 150 of those are professional meteorologists.
The board logged more than a million postings in the 12-month period starting in February 2006, but Legette says the summer volume is about half what it is in winter.
The board does have some heat-wave enthusiasts, he said, but a heat wave lacks the lure and drama of the big attraction: snow.
The Mid-Atlantic contingent heats up when snow threatens. It doesn't matter if it actually materializes; frustration is one of the driving forces. Snow in the Mid-Atlantic is much like the city's sports teams: It forever teases and rarely satisfies.
Yesterday, the talk was about larger things. About 50 of the participants listened to a dispassionate debate on global warming, which was a centerpiece of the three-day conference.
Joe D'Aleo, a meteorologist with WSI Corp., a commercial forecasting company in Massachusetts, argued that global warming was more natural than man-made. He said factors such as the sun's output, the lack of volcanic activity, and changes in the oceans were at work.
"The greenhouse effect is real," he said, "but changes have been less or decreasing, and forecasts overdone. There is not the total consensus, nor is the science settled."
Keith W. Dixon, a researcher at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, countered that the evidence is convincing that man is behind the warming.
Since 1960, he said, computer models show clearly that the amount of warming exceeds what would be expected under strictly "natural" conditions.
The conferees also listened to a cerebral talk on extreme rainfall events from Wes Junker, an expert on precipitation forecasting.
Yes, Junker said, the so-called fall line - that area of elevated terrain just to the west of the Interstate 95 corridor - is a factor in heavy rains from the Baltimore area on north.
Junker himself is a chat board semi-regular. He is retired from the National Weather Service, and he posts as "usedtobe."