Her Name Will Be Faith by Christopher Nicole Read Free Book Online

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 i f 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