Blast from the Past

The past few decades have been quite exciting for meteorologists as our field, like many others, has been transformed by massive technological change. 

Today I took some time to go through my personal archives from graduate school and finally pitch some stuff that's been collecting dust for years.  It was a good reminder of just how far we've come in the past 25 to 30 years. 

As an undergrad in the late 1980s, the Internet wasn't really yet a thing.  I don't recall using it and I certainly didn't have an e-mail account.  We did not look at weather observations, satellite imagery, radar imagery, or model forecasts online.  That information came via DIFAX charts and you were happy to get what you got.  If you wanted to forecast the weather, you had to go somewhere that had these charts, such as a University "map room", so named because the maps were simply hung on the wall. 

Through the 1990s, DIFAX remained a thing and I spent a lot of time in graduate school in the map room trying to figure out the ski weather in the Cascades.  Here's an analysis from 06Z 20 January 1993, a day that will live in infamy in Seattle.  Note the tightly wound cyclone just offshore, which would continue to deepen, eventually generating damaging winds across the Puget Sound.

A portion of my dissertation examined the fine-scale structure of that storm and why it was so damaging, but I have two strong memories about that day.  The first is that one of my fellow graduate students surfed the Puget Sound.  The second is that we tried to go night skiing after the big blow and it was pretty much a disaster trying to get up to the ski area.  I have no recollection of whether or not the skiing was any good, but it probably wasn't.  It sowed heavily in advance of the cyclone, but as it moved through, marine air flooded into the Cascades and likely created even mankier conditions.  Yet another reason to live in Utah. 

When I started at the University of Washington in the summer of 1989, the first job I was assigned involved plotting cross sections.  This involved plotting profiles of wind and temperature by hand from alphanumeric upper-air sounding data, something that nobody has done in ages.  There was no computer program that could do this at the time.  Below is an example, with a manual analysis of temperature (solid lines) and wind speed into/out of the cross section dashed). 

My oh my how things have changed and for the better.   Eventually the bots will probably take over, but for now, this really is a great time to be a meteorologist.  I don't long for the old days, although I would take my 25-year-old body again in a heart beat.