Weather Whys; National Climatic Data Center

This is weather-wise. Every day, more than 12,000 volunteer weather observers go out to their personal weather stations and record temperatures and precipitation. Those observers provide a wealth of data, which is the backbone of the United States' climatological record. But it is a frightful amount of information, and someone's got to process it. That job falls to the men and women of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. The center is often called the NCDC. Each month, thousands upon thousands of forms come in, bearing the daily records of many dedicated observers, some of whom have been gathering data for more than 50 years. Their shaky, arthritic handwriting speaks of decades of commitment to their task. But the staff of NCDC has to go through each and every form, looking for questionable entries, which a well-meaning observer might have made. For instance, one observer witnessed the passage of a tropical storm over his Gulf Coast home.

That day, his station recorded 14 inches of rain plus a fraction. In his excitement, the man wrote the fraction on his form, but neglected to include the 14. A lured NCDC staffers caught the omission and the record was set straight. The National Climatic Data Center publishes several periodicals which use the collected information. For instance, one of them lists the precipitation received at every station in a particular state for a given month. It's a challenging job to get all the forms processed in time, but staffers are still able to manage it before the next month's data come rolling in. Whether wise is produced with the assistance of the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, the Oklahoma Climateological Survey, and the School of Meteorology, all at the University of Oklahoma, and is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. And for whether wise, I'm Drew Barla.