Like a lot of people who wound up following my career path, I was indeed a total "weather geek" as a kid- although unlike many weather weenies, it wasn't my sole focus. I was a science geek in many other regards (biology, chemistry, geology- there will be posts about that) as well. But weather was one of the top passions.
Unlike most boys, I would listen to/watch the news not for the baseball scores, but for the metro area's daily high temperatures. One of the few things that would get me out of bed in the morning was to go watch the first weather reports on the early show. I had a rain gauge set up in the back yard, a minimum-maximum thermometer and other instruments, and I recorded their data daily for years. I'd obsess over measuring the temperature differences and other microclimatic variations between the front and back lawns, sun and shade, and between my parents' house and my grandpa's house on the next street. I made records of the visibility and different classes of clouds seen during different days and seasons, and tried to figure out ways to calculate cloud cover, visual range, and raindrop size. I'd go out in the rain or send my poor dad out in the rain when I was sick to calculate rainfall rates from different passing showers or the hourly progression of storms. There were no tornadoes or such storms to chase in Northern California, but I would convince my parents to take me on weekend day trips to places with differing microclimates.
I learned or got better at math as a kid by calculating things such as daily and monthly average temperature, storm total rainfall, percentage differences between the temperatures at one location and other, etc. One of my junior high school math teachers, in an earlier career, was one of the first "Hurricane Hunters" for the military, and knowing of my interest in weather, regaled me with exciting stories of flights into the eyes of storms. And, he kept reminding me that if I wanted to become a "weatherman," I'd need to get very good grades in math classes and take a lot of math and science courses: that advice made an impact.
In high school, with the help of a teacher and some friends, we made weather balloons of a sort, and launched them with postcards attached. One of them came down on a golf course about 100 kilometers away and the card was sent back by a golfer who said it distracted him when he was trying to putt.
When I was young, my concept of an actual, real, practicing "weatherman" back then- that's what we called them- was of someone who spent all day frantically driving around to different weather stations all over a region and constantly taking readings to decipher patterns and trends to make a forecast. The guy on TV was just the guy who ***reported*** the meteorology, not the one who actually did it, in much the same way that the sportscaster wasn't playing the football game, but reported the numbers (scores) and outcome. Remember, this was before computers, dataloggers, Internet, and GPS technology.
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