Weathering Spring Weather

THE CALL CAME FROM AN IMPATIENT traveler, a woman desperate to drive from Dallas to Denver. For 30 minutes, Skip Ely patiently repeated the severe winter-weather forecast for her route. “Then it hit me,1’ says Ely, chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Fort Worth. “What she wanted me to do was change the forecast, But any way I cut it, there still was six inches of snow in Amarillo.”

The tricky part about North Texas weather is predicting the six inches of snow in the first place. Hence those false alarms from December to March. We rush to the grocery store, stock up on chili and hot cider, check the antifreeze, stay up late watching old movies because tomorrow will be a “snow day”-and then wake up to find that the impending blizzard just “slid by to the north.”

But consider the plight of Ely and his staff of 17 hard-working meteorologists.

“Snow comes with difficulty here,” says Ely, who has been in the business of predicting weather for 30 years. “You need cold air, moisture, and energy, something to get the air rising, to produce snow in North Texas. We’re close to the Gulf, and, as a result, it’s rarely cold enough for snow. But when the cold air does come, it generally sweeps out the moisture as it blows through. The conditions for snow rarely coexist, but when it seems they will, we say so.”

The odds during spring and fall’s meteorological crap shoot turn somewhat in Ely’s favor, however. “We’ve got more experience with thunderstorms and tornadic weather than we do with snow,” he says.

Still, Ely says even his wife isn’t entirely convinced: “If you can’t change the weather, what good are you?”