Confessions of a Weather Geek

Icount myself among the millions who are obsessed with the weather. The screen protector on my phone shows permanent wear over The Weather Channel icon. I switched to cable because my satellite TV always went out during severe thunderstorms.

As all committed outdoor recreationists know, monitoring the weather can mean the difference between comfort and discomfort, pleasure and pain, peace and war, or even life and death. Unless you live in the desert, the weather provides endless spectacle and drama—and hell, it’s just fun to know what’s going on out there.

In my 20s when I was sailing every free minute I had, I was obsessed with the hypnotic rattle of the NOAA Weather Radio marine broadcast. Even in the dead of winter, I’d rarely wake up or go to sleep without clicking on my Radio Shack weather-band radio to listen to the forecast for inshore and offshore waters along the New England coast. The buoy reports from Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals were particular fascinations. There, where fishermen have toiled for centuries, the sea bottom rises and converts the Atlantic breezes into steep waves, especially extreme during big storms.

One night at work, a strong wind was buffeting the building I was in. When I’d finished, I raced home and punched the button on the radio. The recorded voice was intoning a “storm warning” with winds of 55 to 60 knots out of the northeast. The buoy reports were impressive, with waves of 35 to 40 feet. Compelled by the potential for drama and excitement, I decided to don my foul-weather gear and drive to a spit of land in Massachusetts Bay called Nahant. On the town’s highest point was an abandoned Nike missile base. The weed-strewn concrete tarmac extended to the edge of a 40-foot cliff with direct exposure to the Atlantic.

The powerful wind and rain made it impossible to stand, so I got on my hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the cliff. There, before me, were huge, heaving waves exploding on the rocks with a thundering force I could feel in my sinuses. The roaring wind drove salty spindrift at high speed into my face. The droplets tore at my skin like a rasp. I could scarcely look for more than a few seconds at a time, but the scene was so magnificent in its unrestrained power, it has remained with me in vivid detail for more than 35 years.

I went home and turned on the weather radio and listened to the storm play out over the next couple of days, strangely gratified that I’d actually lived a little piece of it. Of all my time on and around the water, few experiences match that radio-spawned moment of seeing and feeling the power of the angry sea.

In this issue, Editor-at-Large Justin Ratcliffe reflects on the British version of NOAA Weather Radio, the BBC’s “Shipping Forecast.” He recalls his family listening to the mellifluous voice that read the U.K. marine details.

“For those at sea in the days before meteorological reports by satellite, it could mean the difference between life and death,” he writes. “For the rest of us, the litany of names and numbers simply served to confirm romantic notions of our island status, creating a snug (and somewhat smug) feeling of well-being as we imagined squally seascapes from the cozy comfort of our own homes.”

NOAA Weather Radio, with its hypnotic, computer-generated “reader” delivering the forecast to anyone within range of a station, may lack the poetry and romance of the “Shipping Forecast,” but it still enchants me and ignites my imagination. Whether on the water or ashore, it’s music to the ears of a weather geek.