Source: http://ift.tt/vggwU1 --- Saturday, July 29, 2017
The absence of any Windows and a constant, humming fluorescence give the forecasting floor of the Mt. Holly National Weather Service bureau a timeless quality not unlike that of an Atlantic City casino, where day and night are marked by the same pulsing light. Thirty computer monitors and four sixty-inch flat-screen TVs flank the walls, filling the room with cool blue light. There’s a vibration there, too. The combined workings of dozens of strong hard drives and the equally strong fans required to keep them from overheating give off a kind of alien-spaceship buzz. The entire effect can feel like one of inhuman sensory deprivation—or at least sensory reassignment, dialing you in to the constant flash of radar and innumerable, incomparable graphs. A special way of looking at our planet’s nature. Watching this data shift and stream were two young forecasters, dressed in the requisite National Weather Service uniform: faded jeans, a T-shirt, and a fleece pullover. She wore pink socks and a ponytail. He had wire-rimmed glasses and running sneakers. They sat, as they did most midnight shifts, with their backs to each other. She was working the short-term forecasting desk, crunching line after line of data to generate the forecasts that would keep the Philadelphia International Airport and the ports of New Jersey running for the next twenty-four hours. He was working the long-term desk: generating a far more general forecast that woul ...
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