The Wonderful Art of Weathercasting

By LANCE MORROW

Americans have contemplated this annus mirabilis of weird weather with a special fascination. But even when the barometer is less mercurial, they pay almost abnormal attention to the weather's moods and the people who predict them. Americans have become chronic weather junkies. They monitor it the way a hypochondriac listens to his own breathing and heart-beat in the middle of the night. Some people, of course, have an urgent need to know: boatmen, farmers, construction workers, streetwalkers. But others whose daily exposure to the hazards of the open air is limited to three minutes between bus stop and office lobby are also curious to the point of vague anxiety about variations in the temperature and the chances of rain.

This enduring preoccupation has, over the years, developed a native American art form, the television weathercast, and its attending priesthood of TV forecasters. It is an odd and specialized calling: not exactly journalism, not exactly meteorology, not exactly soothsaying, not exactly show business, but parts of all four. TV weathercasters have been much mocked for their polyester jocularity, for what seem bizarrely pseudo-scientific discourses to explain that it will be cool and windy tomorrow. It is, critics say, the baton twirling of TV news.

The criticism is essentially unfair; people want to know about the weather, and TV forecasters tell them--not just the niggardly name, rank and serial number of temperature highs and lows but also the larger meteorological events: cold sweeping down from Canada, a warm front out of the Gulf Stream or the metastasis of a storm from Martinique. It may sometimes sound like a cheerful patter of mumbo jumbo and Celsius conversions, like a lounge comedian who did a semester at M.I.T., but on the whole, people learn what they want to know. The audience pays weathercasters the compliment of its attention, and advertisers pay the compliment of their dollars. The weather is always among the surest draws on local news.

Still, the mockery of TV weathercasters is probably inevitable. The art form is an original, without ancestors; it is bound now and then to be a sort of satire upon itself. Every night on millions of TV screens, the breezy wizards conjure hieratically with nature. They prophesy. Warm and cold fronts spearhead across their maps like armies. Black clouds and jagged lightning add a Shakespearean flourish to their charts. Their satellites look down like the eye of God, giving the world a dramatic and curiously abstracted view of what is about to happen to it.

Although the elements change as swiftly as the shapes of clouds, the weathercaster's three-to-four-minute performance is, in its discipline, as rigid as a sonnet or a haiku. The ritual be gins with the anchorman passing the baton with an oafishly merry transition line like: "Well, buddy, you sure did it to us yesterday, didn't you?" The weatherman casts his eyes downward with a chastened chuckle, accepting responsibility and thereby obscurely associating himself with nature's Higher Authorities.

Now the forecaster commences the two-part substance of his report: first the present (a satellite photograph, high and low pressure systems indicated, current readings of wind and temperature), then a commercial break, then the second part, the future (tonight, tomorrow morning and the "long-range forecast," an educated guess on the next four or five days).

Within the formula, a thousand variations flourish. Weathercasters differ about the measure of dignity the occasion calls for. Before Willard Scott moved to NBC's Today Show, he be came a Washington, D.C., fixture by giving his WRC-TV weathercast in kilts, Robin Hood costumes or George Washington getups. Audiences in Savannah have had a weather reporter who talked to a seagull; those in Cleveland have enjoyed one who blew hot licks on his trumpet between temperature recitations. Station KDBC-TV in El Paso has a Lhasa Apso named Puffy Little Cloud who gives a forecast by appearing on-camera in an outfit appropriate to the weather.

The history of television weathercasting does not exactly en courage reverence. In the beginning, stations just had a staff announcer rip the forecast off the A. P. ticker. Stations with commercial foresight, however, brought in scientists or pseudo scientists to discourse on occluded fronts and thermal inversions. The weather package was born: a short noncontroversial segment of the local news, with almost universal audience interest. In the mid-and late '50s came the era of the weather girl--sex to relieve the tedium of the millibars. The acts ranged from chirpy to sultry. The women, often blond, busty and breathy, made a warm front sound like a proposition. NBC's Tedi Thurman used to peek from behind a shower curtain to coo: "The temperature in New York is 46, and me, I'm 36-26-36."

Such a history has tended to dam age the self-esteem of TV weathercasters. Sometimes they even suspect themselves of fraud. Willard Scott has been heard to say, with an undercurrent of melancholy: "A trained gorilla could do what I do." In fact, even if some of today's forecasters are merely local station Ken dolls rolled out to mouth data gleaned from WE 6-1212, many are knowledgeable meteorologists who provide a valuable public service. Gordon Barnes of WDVM-TV in Washington, D.C., operates his own independent weather service. The best in the business is Dr. Frank Field of WNBC-TV in New York; Field's scientific background and intelligence give his reports an authority that none can match.

Almost all TV weathercasters rely primarily upon the basic data provided by the National Weather Service. A private ser vice, Accu-Weather, supplies information to more than 40 TV stations around the nation. But weathermen, the good ones at least, pa somewhat like doctors: several examining the same patient may arrive at different diagnoses. Experience and savvy count--knowing, for example, when a minor geographical shift of a pressure system might make the difference between a drenching rain and a couple of feet of snow.

Are weathercasts really necessary? Not absolutely. But in a nation of highly mobile and widely scattered people, it is both a comfort and a convenience to see the national weather satellite pictures, to watch the migrant storms and bright patches mar bling the land, and know just what kind of weather friends and family are under. An intelligent forecast enables people to plan their lives a little, instead of passively awaiting the atmosphere's surprises. Foreknowledge mitigates the tyranny of nature.

Obsessive weather monitoring, in any case, is an old American custom. Thomas Jefferson was mysteriously compulsive about the weather. He kept interminable logs of changes in the temperature. He knew what millions in the weathercasters' audiences may sense: if you know what the weather (a primal force in the world) is up to, you are somehow, obscurely but actually, in control of it.

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