The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  I heard myself gasp.

  We were standing before a twenty-foot-high viewscreen that showed the entire western hemisphere. I could make out the North and South American continents clearly, even though clouds obscured broad stretches of land and sea. The Arctic glittered dazzlingly, and the sweep of colors—blue, green, red, white—was literally breathtaking.

  On the other side of the room, the other side of the world: Europe, Africa, Asia, the broad Pacific, covered in their entirety by two more viewscreens.

  “This never fails to awe people,” Barney said softly. “Including me, no matter how often I see it.”

  “It’s . . .” I groped for a word, “. . . unbelievable.”

  “The pictures are being transmitted from the synchronous space stations. We can see the entire world’s weather patterns at a glance.”

  She walked to the podium that stood in the center of the room. A few touches on the control switches there, and weather maps sprang up on the viewscreens, superimposed on the televised pictures.

  “We can backtrack,” she said, her fingers flickering across the controls, “and see what the weather maps looked like yesterday . . .” the map shifted and changed slightly, “or the day before . . . or last week . . . last year . . .”

  “What about tomorrow, or next week, or next year?”

  “Tomorrow’s no problem.” The map shifted again. I could see that the storm now covering the area where Thornton dredges were trying to operate would lift off by tomorrow.

  “We can give you an educated guess about next week,” Barney said, “but it’s so vague that we don’t bother making up the maps for it. As for next year,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “you’ll have to consult the Old Farmer’s Almanac. That’s what we all do.”

  “Is that what Ted Marrett does?”

  Surprised, she asked, “Do you know Ted?”

  “We met last night. Didn’t your uncle tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t mention it. He’s rather forgetful; it’s sort of a family trait.”

  “Is Ted here? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “He’s at MIT in the morning,” Barney said. “We generally see him at lunch.”

  I glanced at my wristwatch. Almost noon.

  “Where do you eat?”

  “There’s a cafeteria here in the building. Would you like to join us?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I warn you,” she said seriously, “there’s usually nothing but shoptalk.”

  “If the shoptalk’s about weather control, I want to hear it.”

  3. Aerodynamics, Plus Water

  THE Climatology Division’s cafeteria was large, very crowded and noisy, and terribly depressing. The walls were painted dead gray, and the few attempts someone had made at decorations had long ago faded into near-oblivion. Streams of people jostled through the lines and crowded the bare plastic tables. There was practically no real food at all, just synthetics and concentrates. Hardly appetizing, although Barney seemed to be pleased enough with the selection.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked me as we hunted for an unoccupied table.

  My tray was nearly empty. “I . . . uh, I guess I’m used to Island food,” I lied clumsily.

  “There are better restaurants in the towns nearby, and in Boston, of course. But they’re pretty expensive.”

  “Real meat is worth the money,” I said.

  She gave me a funny look, then dropped the subject.

  By the time we found a table and sat down, Ted had arrived.

  “That’s Tuli Noyon with Ted,” Barney told me as they took trays and started working their way down the chow line. “Tuli’s from Mongolia. Ted met him at MIT and got him a part-time job here. He’s a chemical kineticist.”

  “A what?”

  “Chemical kineticist,” she said again. “Tuli’s been working with my uncle on new chemical catalysts that can change the energy balance of an air mass.”

  “Oh. Something like cloud seeding?”

  “Sort of.”

  Tuli had a stocky build that disguised his height; but I saw that he was nearly as tall as Ted. His face was oval, brown-skinned, flat featured—more like an Eskimo’s than any Oriental I had ever seen before.

  As the two of them weaved through the crowded tables toward us, I could see that they were deep in conversation, with Ted doing most of the talking. He was balancing a heavily loaded tray with one hand and gesticulating vividly with the other. Tuli was nodding, his round face nearly expressionless.

  I rose as they put their trays down on our table. Ted nodded a greeting at Barney and me without breaking vocal stride:

  “So Gustafson’s agreed to let me use the MIT computer on the midnight-to-four shift, if I can get somebody to program it. That’s where you come in, Barney.”

  Tuli, who had remained standing, said to me, “I am Tuli Noyon, a friend and associate of this red-headed talking machine.”

  I had to laugh. “I’m Jerry Thom.” We shook hands and sat down.

  “So I forgot to introduce you,” Ted muttered, already digging into his food. “More important things percolating in my skull. Barney, you’ve got to squeeze some time to program the MIT machine for me. And maybe bootleg a little time on the computer here. It’s for a good cause.”

  “It’s always for a good cause.” But she was smiling at him.

  “Ted has almost convinced me,” Tuli said, “that he can make pinpoint weather forecasts two or three weeks in advance.”

  “By using the turbulence equations?” Barney asked.

  Ted nodded at her as he swallowed a forkful of imitation steak.

  “Will your two-week forecast be better than the Weather Bureau’s thirty-day predictions?” I asked.

  He swallowed hard. “Better? No comparison, buddy. That monthly dream sheet Rossman puts out is just a general look at regional trends—temperature, rainfall for regions like New England or the Southwest. Runs about seventy-five percent accurate on temperature, less’n fifty percent on precipitation. Pretty punk.”

  “And your forecasts?”

  “Ninety-five percent accuracy, plus. And pinpointed! With a little work, I’ll be able to tell you which side of the street gets wet from a cloudburst. You’ll be able to set your watch by these forecasts.”

  “That may be a slight exaggeration,” Tuli said. “And although the monthly forecasts we do are very vague, the Bureau’s three-day forecasts—put out by the various local centers—are generally about ninety percent accurate.”

  “I’m not exaggerating,” Ted insisted. “And even the best forecasts the Bureau’ll make only give general guesstimates on temperature, wind, and precipitation totals. Listen, I’ve seen guys program old wives’ tales into the computers—you know, ‘Red sky at morning, sailor take warning,’ that kind of stuff. It was just as accurate as the Bureau’s daily forecasts. Honest, I mean it! But I’m making exact predictions. To the degree, mile per hour of wind speed, and tenth-inch of precipitation.”

  “That will be very impressive,” Tuli said, “if it works.”

  “Okay, doubting Confucius; I did a hand calculation for Boston for the rest of the week. If it works out okay, we can go to the machine and do a full week for the whole continental United States.”

  “Such a humble beginning,” Tuli said, straight-faced. “Why not forecast the entire summer for the whole world?”

  Ted looked at him. “Next week, maybe.”

  “I can see there won’t be much sleep between now and Monday,” Barney said.

  “Probably the rest of next week, too,” Ted answered cheerfully. “I want to do the climatological prediction for the next three months.”

  Tuli said, “When you finally get your degree, you should share it with Barney.”

  “I’ve threatened to marry her; if that doesn’t scare her off, nothing will.”

  Barney said nothing and the conversation seemed to stall. “May I ask a question?”

  “Sure, Je
rry.”

  “You talked about weather forecasts and climate predictions. What’s the difference?”

  Ted downed the last of his protein concentrate, then said, “What’d the Red Sox do last night?”

  “Huh?”

  “They won, four to nothing,” he answered his own question.

  “But what’s that got to do with—”

  He waved me down. “Night before they also won, six to five. But Monday they got clobbered, eight to one.”

  “A barbaric sport,” Tuli murmured. “It will never replace archery.”

  “Each individual game,” Ted went on, ignoring him, “is like a day’s weather.”

  “You mean each one is different.”

  “Sure. A shutout, a slugfest, tight game, runaway . . . they’re all baseball, all played under the same rules. But no two games are exactly alike. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “Now, where are the Sox in the standings? Fourth, isn’t it? Two games behind Seattle. That’s the season’s climate . . . so far. Last year it was sixth place, seventeen games off the pennant winners.

  “I think I see. The overall effect—”

  “Of many days’ weather,” Ted finished for me, “makes up the climate. You can predict that the Sox will end up somewhere between third and sixth this year. That’s pretty clear. But predicting the score of tomorrow’s game . . . that’s tough. Right?”

  “I think I see.”

  “Okay, now if I can get you two guys to help me,” he said to Barney and Tuli, “we ought to be able to pinpoint the weather for any spot in the country two or three weeks ahead. How’s that for a master’s thesis?”

  “I don’t know anything about a thesis,” I said, “but it’s just what I came here to talk about.”

  I explained, while the cafeteria slowly emptied of people, about the storms in the Pacific and Father’s dredging operations.

  Ted listened quietly, then said, “It’s been a bad year out there, all right. Always is during a sunspot minimum. But you need more than accurate forecasts. You need weather control.”

  “I asked Dr. Rossman about that, and he said it’s impossible.”

  “That’s right, it is . . . to him.”

  “But to you?”

  He hunched closer to the table, lowering his voice in the growing quietness of the cafeteria. “Listen. What do you need for weather control? First, you need detailed info on what’s going on, the real weather at the moment. We’ve got that. Second, you’ve got to be able to make changes in the weather, where and when you want ’em. Real changes, not just ripples. Guys like Tuli and Dr. Barneveldt are turning out dandy chemicals for seeding clouds and changing energy balances. And the Air Force has lasers in orbit that’ll fry eggs from a thousand miles out.”

  He took a gulp of coffee, then resumed. “Third, you need to know the atmosphere’s heat budget—energy balance—all around the world. We can do that, right now. Last, you have to be able to forecast with pinpoint accuracy what the weather all over the world will be for weeks or months ahead. Then you can see what effects your weather changes’ll make. You don’t dare try squashing a storm if you’re afraid it’ll cause a blizzard in Florida.”

  It sounded logical. “I see. Now, you’re working on that last item, the long-range weather forecasts with pinpoint accuracy.”

  “By the end of next week we ought to know if we can do it. Think we can.”

  “And you really believe,” Barney said, with a slight frown of concentration, “that the turbulence equations are the key to accurate long-range forecasts.”

  “They’re the whole show!” Ted insisted. “Listen. Weather is nothing more than turbulent airflow . . . simple aerodynamics, plus water.” He turned to me and went on, “The water’s what makes it tricky . . . can be vapor, liquid or solid . . . can release heat or soak it up . . . and most of what we really want out of a weather prediction is info on when and how much rain or snow we’ll get. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. From an aerodynamicist’s viewpoint, the weather’s just a boundary layer problem . . . air rubbing against the surface of the Earth. But it’s a turbulent boundary layer, that makes it a tough problem. When you feel a wind, it’s hardly ever a strong, smooth, steady flow, is it? It comes in gusts, spurts, never the same for more than a second or two. It’s turbulent!”

  “Turbulent flow,” Tuli explained, “means that the fluid has motion in two planes—horizontally and vertically. Air is in turbulent motion throughout the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere. Above the tropopause . . .”

  “That’s the upper boundary of the troposphere,” Barney added. “Usually about twenty to forty thousand feet altitude.”

  “Yes,” Tuli said. “Above the tropopause is the so-called stratosphere. The airflow there is almost entirely laminar; it flows horizontally, with very little vertical motion.”

  My head was beginning to spin. “Wait a minute. One of you, I forget which, said air is a fluid. Did I hear that right?”

  “Fluids can be liquids, gases, or plasmas,” Tuli answered.

  “Get the picture?” Ted resumed. “What we call weather only happens in the troposphere . . . and it’s in turbulent flow. Above the tropopause, no turbulence and no weather to speak of.”

  “There are jet streams up there,” Tuli said. “They have considerable effect on the weather.”

  “Sure. And if you go farther up there’re electrical effects in the ionosphere, and magnetic storms from solar flares, and cosmic particles and whatnot. But they’re second- or third-order effects. Don’t really make much difference in the day-to-day weather down here. Might have some long-range climatological effects, though.”

  “But the actual weather happens in turbulent air,” I said, trying to get it straight.

  “Check. And because it’s turbulent, there was no real way to predict it, until these Kraichnan Institute studies showed that you can determine what’s happening in a turbulent flow. What I’ve done is to use the Kraichnan work, apply it to weather forecasting. If it works, we’ll be able to really predict the weather, instead of trying to outguess it.”

  “But how are weather forecasts made now? They seem to be pretty good, even without this turbulence business.”

  Ted grinned and leaned back in his chair. “How do they do it now? Lots of ways. Flipping coins, playing numbers games on the computers, waiting for twinges in toes or knees—”

  “Ted, be fair,” Tuli said. “The principal technique is the method of persistence—”

  “You look at the weather around you,” Ted took up, “and try to figure out what’s heading your way and how fast it’s moving. Gets complicated, but it works pretty well for the short term—couple days or so.”

  Tuli added, “We can ‘see’ all around the globe now, thanks to satellites. And detailed mathematical models allow the meteorologists to forecast with some accuracy how the weather patterns will move across the Earth’s surface.”

  “Still a lot of hunchwork in it,” Ted insisted.

  Tuli nodded agreement.

  “It’s slightly bewildering,” I said. Looking around, I could see that we were the last ones in the cafeteria.

  “They’re closing up,” Barney said. “If we don’t want to get the floor-scrubbers showering us . . .”

  “Okay, back to work,” Ted agreed.

  We got up and headed for the door.

  “But you’re really serious,” I asked him, “about this weather-control idea?”

  For the first time, Tuli let a smile break across his stolid expression. “Better ask him a harder question: like, does he intend to breathe all afternoon.”

  “It’s that definite,” I said as we went through the doorway and into the hall.

  “If this forecasting scheme works,” Ted answered, “there’s only one thing more that we’ll need.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Permission.”

  “Is that all? Why, Dr. Rossman should be g
lad to give you the go-ahead.”

  Ted shook his head. “It’s a new idea. And what’s worse, it’s not his idea.”

  A mountain was being built. Vaster than the Alps, higher than the Himalayas, an immense, invisible mountain of air was forming over the Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda and the mainland of America. From high aloft, cold, dense air was sinking down, weighted by its low temperature, and piling up at the ocean’s surface. The mountain grew and spread, real as a peak of rock. But this mountain moved. It swirled in clockwise rotation, pivoting over the ocean, winds flowing out from its edges across land and sea. The high-pressure system pushed its western frontier nearly a hundred miles inland of the American coast. Warm, semitropical air from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico was pulled northward by the clockwise flow, streamed across the East Coast, bringing warmth and moisture with it. Some of the warm air, lighter and more buoyant than the high-pressure mountain, rode up over the colder, denser air mass. As it rose it cooled; the water vapor in it condensed and fell as showers. Meteorologists talked about the Bermuda High. But the people in Boston’s streets simply said, “Spring is here. It’s come at last.”

  I drove back to my hotel room through the gentle spring shower, my stomach rumbling from lack of lunch, and my mind racing to figure out what I would say to Father. I phoned Thornton Aerospace from the car and canceled my reservation back to Hawaii. At the hotel, I told the desk that I would be staying indefinitely and then ordered lunch. Finally, I called Father.

  “And that’s what Dr. Rossman said,” I told him, after a fifteen-minute explanation of the situation. “He can give us extended forecasts, but controlling the storms is impossible, as far as he’s concerned.”

  Father scowled. “That’s not going to be enough to help us, Jeremy.”

  “I know.”

  The videophone was sitting on the coffee table, next to my lunch tray. I got up from the sofa and paced across the room.

  “Stop fidgeting and stay where I can see you!” Father snapped.

  I sat on the windowsill, beside the softly humming air blower, and glanced at the thronged streets far below.