INTRODUCTION

In the second grade he volunteered to do the weather report for his class newspaper. As young as he was, that was a turning point for Tom Moore, now a senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel in Atlanta, Georgia. From then on Tom says, "I was head over heels involved with weather...hooked on it." By the time he reached fourth grade he was known around school as "Mr. Weatherman." As a fifth grader he was visiting the local air force base to get satellite pictures and old weather maps. He recalls building his own weather instruments, some of which actually worked. But most of all Tom remembers the big snowstorms of upstate New York and all of the accompanying excitement: staying awake until the week hours of the morning waiting for the first flakes to fall, and then traipsing in and out of the house every hour to measure snow depths.

Tom's story is not unusual. Many meteorologists say that it was the wonders and mysteries of the atmosphere that pursued them, not the other way around. It is almost as if meteorology--or more broadly, atmospheric science--were a calling rather than a conscious choice. No, you needn't take vows of silence ("Everyone talks about the weather . . .") or poverty, but, as you will see in the sections that follow, meteorology can be a rewarding career in terms of both the interesting variety of challenges and a reasonable good income for many types of jobs.

There aren't a lot of readily available facts and figures out there about meteorology as a discipline. It is, in fact, a field that is undergoing a great deal of change in both the applications of technology and in job opportunities. If you are interested in or have chosen meteorology as a profession, this career guide is designed for you.

Topics addressed on the following pages include: what type of education is required for a degree in meteorology; what schools offer a degree; what the career choices are; what the job market is like and how it's changing; and how to go about landing a job. If the information you need isn't included within the guide, there will be references telling you where to find it.

A lot of people don't even know what a meteorologist is (or even how to pronounce it). Because it may be a misunderstood word, it sometimes stimulates well-meaning but inappropriate layman questions such as, "Do you have a telescope?" or "What about that new comet?" To counter this awkward situation, the term "atmospheric scientist" is gaining popularity.

Meteorologist. Credit it to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle in particular. The renowned Greek philosopher penned a number of scientific treatises in the 4th century B.C., including the first major study of the atmosphere, Meteorologic. The Greek word meteorol refers to something that occurs high in the sky. Thus the word "meteorologist," someone who studies the atmosphere.

The Greeks of Aristotle's time were largely an agrarian and seafaring society, and therefore keen observers of the ever-changing weather. They watched clouds, winds, and rain and tried to understand how they worked and what caused them. But the recorded awareness of atmospheric phenomena traces back even further. In the Biblical book of Job--believed to have been written a century or two before Aristotle's work, and to have been passed down orally from the second millennium B.C.--the Hebrew author has the Lord challenging Job with questions that still interest atmospheric researchers thousands of years later: "What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm...? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, and the surface of the deep is frozen?" (Job 38: 24-30)

For centuries after Job and Aristotle the science of meteorology made only slow progress. The thermometer was not invented until around 1600 when Galileo Galilei discovered that the specific gravity of certain liquids changed with temperature. In 1643, one of Galileo's assistants, Evangelista Torricelli, developed the mercury barometer. The ones used today differ little in design from Torricelli's original.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, meteorology began to take more rapid scientific strides. During the latter half of the century those strides accelerated to an all-out sprint spurred on by a tidal wave of new technology.

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models rode the crest of the wave. As computer technology blossomed, operational NWP models became more and more sophisticated. Since the advent of the primitive, short-range forecasts used in the 1950s, model evolution has been phenomenal. The current super-complex simulations generate multi-level, multi-parameter predictions extending more than a week into the future.

Satellite imagery, which initially (ca. 1960) furnished only static, somewhat astigmatic views of clouds, now provides animated, mesoscale details with 20/20 clarity. Images can be colorized, localized and analyzed.

Weather radars, at first effective only at short ranges and with limited geographical coverage (ca. 1955), now provide continuous, real-time watch over virtually the entire continental United States. The new Doppler radars furnish not only advance warning of severe local storms, but probe the atmosphere for such subtleties as drizzle, snow flurries, and wind shear.

To be sure, the lure of meteorology--and the innovative technology that supports it--extends well beyond the application of forecasting, or "operational meteorology" as it is often called. There are scores of other rewarding careers in addition to the traditional government, military, and private sector forecasting opportunities, and the highly visible weathercasting jobs on television and radio. Challenges abound in research, consulting, teaching, and information systems support.

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