B Franklin is credited as being one of the first to observe (thanks to his connection to mail and newspaper delivery), that weather patterns moved predictably across the continent. (In his case, the continental USA).
But even when I was a child in the 60’s, it wasn’t called a “weather forecast”. It was called a “weather report”.
WJW TV in Cleveland had Dick Goddard as their main weatherman for 50 years. He retired a few months back. In Cleveland, the stations do promote their weather more than any other phase of their broadcast. And, amazingly, every station has the most accurate forecast. He started as a meteorologist with the Air Force in 1949. I suppose after 67 years you could make a good guess at what the weather is going to be like.
Also, I took a college level class in meteorology and one thing we did a couple of times a week was we were given maps of weather and winds aloft for the previous 5 days and were suppose to draw a map of what we thought the weather was going to be like the next day. These were real historical maps and I got OK at doing it. one thing I do remember, it’s been a looooong time, is that 8 out of 10 times, the nightly low temperature will be at the dew/frost point. The trick is questemating that temperature. And on cold winter might with clear skies, it can blow by that point by 10 or more degrees.
Worth mentioning that an allied and still difficult problem in weather is nowcasting. Knowing what the weather is doing right now (as opposed to an hour or so ago) is not trivial, but quite important for some tasks - aviation for one.
It is vastly better than it was, with many more real-time stations, and things like rain radar. It is also where satellites can make a difference as they provide near real time imagery. Tracking a tropical storm becomes vastly easier when you can see the thing plainly. (Predicting where it will go remains something of a lottery.)
But you are still stuck with 2D data in a 3D world. So there is lot you still don’t know.
Re reverse writing on back of maps: around 1960 a Boston station had a woman forecaster who wrote reverse with either hand. Only time I ever saw that.
I always wondered how airplanes avoided ingesting the balloons and radiosondes. Sucking in one of those babies or chopping it up with a propeller can’t be good.
If this guy was using chalk in the 60’s and 70’s, the broadcasts would have been in colour. They wouldn’t necessarily have been archived in colour, so that would account for the youtube clips being black and white, but the original broadcasts would certainly have been in colour.
In Sled Driver, Brian Shul describes the terrifying experience when piloting an SR-71, seeing a tiny dot on the horizon, one that very quickly turned into a weather balloon and then seen in the rear view mirror tumbling in shreds having been torn apart by the vortexes coming off the plane. All took a just a few seconds. An SR-71 probably wouldn’t survive a direct hit, not at the speeds involved. But more conventional aircraft engines ingest large birds and survive (albeit at less than cruising speeds). The biggest risk is probably hitting the sonde and it managing to come in through the wind-shield. However the sondes I have seen have been very light, the battery being by far the biggest and heaviest component. The whole thing in a simple Styrofoam box. After all, you want them to be as light as feasible to save on balloon size.
No, they technically could have been, but in reality almost certainly were not. Color broadcasting was a lengthy phased process and for a long time only selected premium shows were broadcast in color. News and weather broadcasts were pretty low on the totem pole. By the time chalk guy Percy Saltzman left the CBC, which can be regarded as a major milestone marking the end of the chalkboard era, only about half of Americans had color TVs, Bonanza was still a hit, and a lot if not most programming was still black and white. Some might be old enough to remember color programs like Bonanza being preceded by the iconic NBC peacock and the voiceover “the following program is brought to you in living color on NBC”. For a long time that was a Big Deal because most shows weren’t.
NBC made a big deal of that slogan because it was introduced in 1957. All three networks went all color prime-time programming in 1966 and by the next year news and soaps were all color. Local stations might have been slower to make the switchover, but the big network O-and-O (owned and operated) stations would definitely have done it by the early 60s.
So by the time Manduck is talking about, the 60s and 70s, almost all stations were broadcasting in color. It would have been a rare, small, rural station that didn’t, if any existed at all.
I don’t know if any of these old TV weather people used it, but there is a method–commonly used in educational videos on youtube these days–where the person is facing the camera and writes on glass or plexiglass in a normal way. If the camera were pointed directly at them, the writing would look backwards. Instead, the camera is pointed at a mirror that is reflecting the subject, and so the backwards writing gets reversed and looks normal.
Bahaha!
+1
Thanks for the clarification. I know there was a long period where color programming was relatively rare but I had thought that the transition to pretty much all color came later than it did. You’re quite correct about about the 1966-67 season being the launch of all-color prime time; it seems that 1965 was the year that intense competition starting ramping up color in a hurry. This was not, however, the case in Canada which is probably why I had my timeframes confuffled. Canada has often been ahead or at least kept pace with the US in telecommunications, but it lagged way behind in color TV, which didn’t even start until the fall of 1966.
Whether the venerable Percy Saltzman and his famous blackboard were ever broadcast in color remains a mystery, but possibly some US chalkmen were before the weather chalkboard was finally retired.