I have very mixed feeling abouts this anecdote. It gets more metric units out there, being used, so it can't be bad, right? However, to hear two guys from the same agency giving training material in both metric and Customary must be fairly confusing to the audience. It clearly reflects a complete lack of measurement unit strategy on the part of the agency. Anything goes! It may be a necessary interim steps. Hopefully metric will prevail and take over. You have to read both "Federal Standard Algorithms for Automated Weather Observing Stations" and the "Federal Meteorological Handbook" (both available online) to realize they are entirely Customary internally. The automated weather observation systems internally average and round in Customary. Even though temperature and dewpoint are reported in Celsius degrees in METAR (automated aviation weather reports), they were rounded to whole Fahrenheit degrees, then converted. Wind is in whole knots (and bearings to nearest ten degrees). Visibility is in common fractions of a mile to 3 miles, then whole miles to 10 miles, cloud heights to nearest 50 feet, etc. Pressure is inches Hg to 0.005". Each tip of the tipping bucket rain sensor is 0.01". As they have designed their systems, algorithms, and record keeping around these units, I don't see them metricating soon or easily.
--- On Sat, 2/26/11, James R. Frysinger <[email protected]> wrote: From: James R. Frysinger <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:49929] Weather spotter class To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, February 26, 2011, 3:38 PM I attended a 2 hour weather spotter class up in Cookeville TN this morning. Two meteorologists from the National Weather Service led the class. One of them, new to the Nashville weather station, gave all atmospheric elevations, distances, etc. in meters and kilometers without providing any non-metric equivalents. Nobody asked for clarification. The other meteorologist, the one who has been in the area for a longer time and who is more senior, used nothing but non-metric indications and the same was true of the slides that were presented. Both were under 40 years of age, in my estimation. (Mere pups!) I enjoyed the chance to hear metric units being used and to notice no adverse effects from this on the audience. Jim -- James R. Frysinger 632 Stony Point Mountain Road Doyle, TN 38559-3030 (C) 931.212.0267 (H) 931.657.3107 (F) 931.657.3108
