National Weather Service Job Shadow

Early Sunday morning, November 1, I drove three hours to Gray, Maine to job shadow at the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office.  I had contacted Dan St. Jean, the Science and Operations Officer, a Plymouth State alum, and he responded back saying he’d pair me up with Jim Hayes, the short-term forecaster for that day.  I was really looking forward to spending a day at a National Weather Service Forecast Office.  Previously, I had visited the office during a student American Meteorological Society tour, but to be in a NWS office for 6 straight hours (regardless of the weather) was a dream come true.

I met Jim right off the bat because he had to let me in the door (it’s a government agency).  He’s a really nice guy.  He’s been forecasting for several decades, so he knows his stuff.  He started off quizzing me in my meteorological knowledge – asking me about the water vapor patterns on the satellite, what specific features meant, etc.  Luckily, I was able to answer correctly!  He then had me do a hand analysis (what meteorologists call isoplething, where you analyze a map by drawing lines of a constant variable, in this case pressure, called isobars, to analyze the cold front).  Not having practiced isoplething in a while, I was pretty rusty.  Jim said it’s really important in this day and age of technology not to rely solely on the computer models, and it really helps to get a feel for the current weather by actually stepping away from the computer and doing a map analysis by hand.

After giving me a quick tour of the office, we then went back to his workstation, called the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, or AWIPS for short.  We looked at visible satellite data showing clouds over the mountains of New Hampshire and Maine overlayed with surface data (temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction).  We were also looking at the winds and waves over the ocean, because a Small Craft Advisory was in effect through the evening.  I was then really surprised when he told me to write the Near Term and Marine sections of the Area Forecast Discussion, a technical text product disseminated to broadcasters and others looking for an inside scoop of what the forecasters at the National Weather Service are thinking.

The result was the following:

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GRAY ME
1039 AM EST SUN NOV 1 2009

NEAR TERM /UNTIL 6 PM THIS EVENING/

COLD FRONT MOVING OFF THE COAST THIS MORNING. UPSLOPE CUMULUS CLOUDS
IN COLD AIR ADVECTION ACROSS NORTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE AND MAINE MOUNTAINS
THIS MORNING. NORTHEASTERLY WINDS GUSTING TO 20 KTS AT KLEB AS OF 15Z.
TEMPERATURES RISING INTO THE 50S WITH 56 DEGREES ALREADY AT KPLY. MIX
OF SUN AND CLOUDS EXPECTED TODAY, WITH MORE CLOUDS OVER THE MOUNTAINS.
LITTLE CHANGE IN PREVIOUS TEMPERATURE FORECAST WITH TEMPS TOPPING OUT
IN THE MID 50S, LOWER 50S ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS.

MARINE

IN THE NEAR TERM /TODAY/...
SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY CONTINUES THROUGH THIS EVENING. YESTERDAY'S
SOUTHERLY WIND FETCH GENERATING SEAS OF 3 TO 6 FEET. WINDS EXPECTED
TO STAY BELOW 20 KTS IN COLD AIR ADVECTION BEHIND COLD FRONT.

KAISER

In retrospect, I made a few mistakes (the winds were northwesterly, not northeasterly, and there isn’t a weather station called KPLY), but overall it was really neat.  I then asked him the job shadow questions (see additional pages).

He then updated the near-term forecast (out to 36 hours) for the Gray, ME County Warning Area.  He used an internal chat feature (similar to instant messaging) that allowed him to gain the insight of surrounding Nation Weather Service office meteorologists because the ultimate goal is to make the forecast made by several dozen meteorologists look like it was made by one forecaster.

Overall, the experience was really great.  I’m definitely stoked to be a National Weather Service meteorologist.  I am hoping to setup an internship this summer with the NWS, as Jim said would really give me good experience and give me a leg up when the hiring process came around.

National Weather Service Job Shadow Video by Jason Kaiser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License