Christopher Nicole: Her Name Will Be Faith

“No. I was born in San Francisco. My father was a pharmacist there.”

“What made you move to Florida?”

“I answered the advert for a weatherman, got the job. Simple as that.”

“I really meant, what made you go in for forecasting? I…” she bit her lip, because he was grinning again. No doubt it had been suggested to him before that, with his looks and background, he could have done much better for himself. “I would say you were an athlete, once upon a time.”

This time his grin was more genuine, and even a trifle cynical. “I played football, once upon a time. But never up to draft standard. And a guy has to major in something. I was always interested in TV — since I was a kid in short pants. And also an older cousin of mine was dead keen on sailing — and therefore weather. He’d take me out sometimes as crew — dead boring slopping about waiting for wind, but he was always looking at the sky and forecasting what was coming… and I guess I got involved myself.” He paused to grin at her doubting smile. “Being a forecaster gets to be quite fun, you know. There are a lot of spin-offs, like doing commentaries from helicopters and getting involved in local organizations: you’d be surprised how many people in this country are really interested in the weather, even if they don’t talk about it all the time as they do in England. You get to meet a hell of a lot of interesting folk.”

“And presumably forecasting is a rung on the ladder up,” she suggested.

Another grin. “To becoming a TV personality? You’d better believe it. I don’t intend to stay in forecasting forever.”

She realized she had found the real Richard Connors, a man just trying to work his way into his true place in society, the same as anyone else. She made notes on his college football career, his first job interviews, and his varied progress before moving into the world of television. But when she came to his personal life, his mood suddenly changed. “I shouldn’t think that will interest anyone,” he said.

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” she protested. “That’s what it’s all about.”

He glanced at her ring finger. “Sorry, Mrs Donnelly. My private life stays private.”

They stared at each other, and she realized that he meant what he said. Which left her projected article in tatters. She might as well get up and leave and scrap the idea right now. Then she remembered what Ed had told her. “Then talk to me about the job,” she said. “Weather forecasting. And hurricanes,” she added.

He frowned at her. “Hurricanes? You interested in hurricanes?”

“Sure I am. My parents-in-law have a holiday home in Eleuthera.”

“Is that a fact? Say, would you really like to see how it all works?”

“Yes, I would.” She followed him down endless corridors, past open office doors where typewriters rattled, computers bleeped, and coffee dispensers were in constant use.

“Would you like a coffee?” he asked.

“Not right now, thanks.” She had never tasted anything drinkable from one of those machines.

The studio was like any other television center, somewhat bare except for the various backdrops against which Richard would stand while making his forecasts, and a large and elaborate desk behind which he sat as each program commenced, and dominated by the three cameras, presently unattended.

The control room was far more interesting. Richard introduced her to the news and weather program director, who, even now, was sitting gazing through a soundproof glass wall at three rows of screens showing various pictures, from newsreels and interviews to plain tuning screens. The unit in front of his chair was solid with dials, knobs and switches, microphones and telephones.

“This is where all the mistakes are made,” Richard said solemnly. “As when the anchorman introduces the President’s state visit to France and you’re shown a college quarterback haring down the pitch.”

“Or the met man is left pressing his control button for his next chart and absolutely nothing happens,” the director cut in, laughing.

Richard’s office, on the other hand, was a relaxed place of comfortable furniture, just untidy enough, with piles of paper and reports scattered about, to look lived in. He showed Jo to a very comfortable armchair, seated himself behind his desk, introduced and dismissed his pretty secretary — she had been filing — and then smiled at her. “Now?”

“Well, tell me something about your job. How do you forecast weather?”

“You observe,” he said. “There is really nothing much more to it than that. Anyone can forecast weather, and as I’m sure you know, most people do, constantly. However, the accuracy of the forecast does depend on the number of observations you can get hold of, which rather puts looking out of the window every morning at the bottom of the list. It also depends on the interpretation you put on what you see and learn; that last part can be pure experience, but it helps if you’ve been taught something about meteorology. For instance, a hundred years ago it was difficult to forecast the weather more than twenty-four hours ahead, because then it really was a matter of how much you could see from your window, and relating that to your barometer. The barometer is one of the most important of weather forecasting instruments, providing, that is…” he grinned. “That it’s an accurate barometer.”

“Why is a barometer so important?”

“Because it records the atmospheric pressure around you.”

“But why is pressure important? I thought we were all under pressure? About 15 lbs per square inch of our bodies. Correct?”

“Correct. But that isn’t to say pressure is uniform all over the world. Or even all over the state. The variations, thought of in terms of pressure per square inch of the human body, may not amount to much, although if you think about it, just before a storm, for instance, when it’s all hot and muggy, everyone feels out of sorts. That’s caused simply by a lowering of the pressure. The important thing, from a meteorologist’s point of view, is that pressure controls the flow of wind. Wind flows from high-pressure areas to low-pressure areas, or down the pressure gradients, as we call them, just as water runs downhill. Actually, winds flow round centers of pressure, but always downhill. In the northern hemisphere, it does so in an anti-clockwise direction if it’s a low-pressure system, a depression, and a clockwise direction if it’s a high-pressure cell, an anti-cyclone. South of the equator, the reverse obtains. But a glance at the isobar lines always tells you the direction of the wind, and just about how strong.”

“What’s an isobar?”

“Very simply, it is a line drawn, as a result of reported barometric observations, through all the places on the earth’s surface which have the same pressure at the same time. This is the most important duty of a weather observer, reporting quickly and accurately on the exact conditions wherever he is. In addition to recording the actual cloud formations and precipitations and temperature, all of which are necessary to the forecaster, he will record the barometric pressure. Here in the States we use inches, but in the rest of the world pressure is recorded in millibars. Then, when all those observations are received, the forecaster — or nowadays, the computer — joins all the lines of equal pressure together, making up what we call a synoptic chart.”

“And that tells you what the weather is going to do?”

“Sure. Obviously, if Station A, five hundred miles away, reports heavy cloud and rain at, say, 8.00 am in the morning, and Station B, three hundred miles away, reports blue skies at that hour, and then at ten o’clock Station A reports clearing skies and Station B increasing cloud, you can assume a rain storm is approaching from A to B. If at ten o’clock Station A still reports cloud and rain, when it is also being reported from Station B, then it is obviously a pretty big storm system. That’s pure observation. But the isobars tell us what wind speeds to expect. When the different lines are well spaced, a shallow gradient, we know the wind flow will be light. When the lines appear close packed, a steep gradient, strong winds are indicated. This is very important to ships at sea, which may be travelling down a pressure gradient themselves. It is an axiom, for instance, that if a ship’s barometer drops as much as three millibars in any hour, the crew should prepare for a gale. In the sub-tropics, where there is very little pressure movement at all, a drop of three millibars in one hour can very well indicate a hurricane in the vicinity. But nowadays, of course, we have many more sophisticated ways of telling the weather…”