The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum

Author:Andrew Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

Simulation

7

The Mountaintop

The heat in Colorado was a dry mountain heat, broken in the afternoons by wild thunderstorms that rose up behind the Rocky Mountains. On a cloudless morning in June I drove up out of the city of Boulder, to the point where the suburban houses gave way to sandstone rock formations rising out of meadows of pine and prairie grass. There, at the end of a sweeping driveway, was a cluster of copper-hued towers with crenellated tops, like a mountain fortress. The buildings’ scale was difficult to discern. They had long slit windows and a sturdiness that made them seem like a natural outgrowth of the mountain.

This was the Mesa Lab, the spiritual home of American weather science. Its opening in 1966 as the flagship of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) had marked a moment of reinvention for meteorology, sparked by President Kennedy’s interest. The amazing technological advancements of the Cold War brought entirely new realms of potential to the field. New satellites could look down on the clouds. New electronic computers could calculate equations. New radars could see storms over the horizon. “The sky is quite literally the limit,” Walter Orr Roberts, the first director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said when the building opened. “No field of science—even atomic energy or medicine or space exploration—offers a greater potential for the good of all mankind than does the field of atmospheric science”—as meteorology was renamed by its boosters (and funders) in Washington.

Roberts wanted the architecture of the new lab to reflect that ambition. He hired I. M. Pei for his first major commission and asked for a building that expressed “both the contemplative and exciting aspects of scientific activity.” It should be “monastic, ascetic, but hospitable.” It should have “soul.” For inspiration, Pei camped out on the site among the deer and rabbits, and he visited the Anasazi cliff dwellings in southwestern Colorado. He specified concrete mixed with pink sand from a nearby quarry and had the walls hammered in a way that made them rough-hewn, like stone. The burly rose-colored towers frame the sky, linking the permanence of rock and the capriciousness of clouds. I could feel the tension Roberts envisioned: between stasis and change, what is and what will be. The Mesa Lab is a timeless building devoted to new ideas, which is why I was there: to consider the gap between the sky and its human understanding; between what we know precisely about the atmosphere and what we can’t; between the weather of the present and the weather of the future.

In practical terms, I wanted to know how the weather models worked—how they took the observations and turned them into a forecast. I had seen weather infrastructure all over the world, in space, in the sky and pushed out to every corner of the map. But the models were the suns at the center of this solar system, holding all of that other infrastructure in their orbit. Their appetite for data dictates how and where new weather observations are collected.

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