After two and a half years in the Army, with a job description as a ballistic meteorologist, you may ask why I did not pursue meteorology as a career when I was discharged from the Army.
I did and when I started college at Lamar Tech College in Beaumont Texas I applied for a job at the local airport as a beginning meteorologist with the US Weather Bureau. Lo and behold I got the job with a rating of GS 7, due to my prior Army service. After 3 months training I was put on the midnight shift, by myself, to report the weather, as is was hourly, and to give out the morning weather reports for the day to the local radio stations in the area.
On a normal shift we were required to go outside every 30 minutes to observe the weather not just look at the instruments on the inside. Things like fog, drizzle do not show up on the instruments inside the building. If you were going to send out a forecast you always checked the regional weather in New Orleans to see if they had something not showing up at your station. Oh boy! I wished I had remembered that this one morning as I give my forecast to the local radio stations.
Had I checked New Orleans weather forecast, as I had been instructed to do, I would have seen that a front with huge amounts of rain was a couple of hours away from our Beaumont Weather station. But at 5an the Beaumont weather was clear, not a cloud in the sky. So the forecast that I sent to the radio stations said that today would be nice and sunny!
Well, I got off duty around 8am and by this time the front had arrived, along with buckets and buckets of rain. Needless to say my weather station was sending out a revised forecast for the day! As usual I went to my favorite eating joint to have breakfast and when I walked in, on the radio, blasting away, was my forecast saying today would be nice and sunny. Here I am dripping wet from the sheets of rain coming down, hearing this forecast! Everybody in the restaurant knew me and knew where I worked. Needless to say that bunch never let me forget my famous boo boo!
On another occasion I heard a Trans Texas Airways or TTA Pilot tell how he had just landed his plane, full of passengers, in blinding fog. He said he saw the runway about 10 feet above the ground and I was the one who had giving the ceiling at 500 feet just 30 minutes before that plane landed. I realized then the awesome responsibility a weatherman has working in aviation.
This was the stone that broke the camels back! Yet the major reason I never became a weatherman was I could not pass the math and chemistry courses that I would have had to take to get the meteorological degree.
Still very much interested in the weather and watch it every day on TV. Have two or three weather sites on my computer so I can keep up with what is going on around the world.
After the boo boos I've made I try to give them weathermen some slack.
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