CARIBOU, Maine — Things were pretty quiet Monday afternoon at the National Weather Service office in Caribou as what could be a major snowstorm started churning its way up the Eastern Seaboard toward Maine.
“This really is the calm before the storm,” Richard Okulski, meteorologist in charge at the Caribou office, said. “The tempo here increases as the tempo of the weather event increases.”
In addition to Okulski, there were two weather service officials working in the facility’s computer nerve center Monday afternoon, tracking the course and strength of the storm.
“This is a storm that is certainly in the same category as one we got two years ago around this same time,” he said. “I’m not sure it will be as significant as the blizzard of ‘78, but it will still be significant.”
Pulling up a series of colorful maps, graphs and charts on a bank of computer monitors, Okulski showed in real time the storm’s low pressure center approaching Cape Cod.
That low, he said, is going to intensify as it moves north toward Down East Maine, which could see up to 20 inches of snow and 50 mph winds by Tuesday into Wednesday.
The storm will weaken as it travels toward Aroostook County, he said.
“That is really a good thing,” Okulski said. “If it stayed that strong, we would be in a world of hurt up here.”
Okulski and his team base their predictions on mountains of digital data that form what meteorologists refer to as the “American Model” and “European Model” of weather, the industry standards.
“Those models give us information on temperatures, wind, dew points, precipitation, snow, ice and rain,” he said. They take the information from both models and “render it into a text format, and that is what is then read as forecasts.”
The models are created and updated every six to 12 hours by supercomputers crunching information provided by everything from high-tech satellites to weather balloons sent up twice daily with special weather data-collecting equipment on board.
Even with all the fancy gadgets and gizmos, forecasting the weather is still tricky.
Okulski said he has been at it for more than 26 years.
“The biggest change I’ve seen is back when I started, people expected meteorologists to be wrong,” he said. “Now people expect us to be right, and when we are not, they want to know what went wrong.”
Part of the reason forecasts go awry simply concerns the changeable nature of weather.
“When I left work last Friday, I thought the weather event we were getting over the weekend would be significant, and this one coming would turn out to sea,” Okulski said. “Turns out it’s the other way around.”
But with improved technology has come improved weather forecasting, he said.
“Our four-day forecasts are now as good as our two-day ones were two decades ago,” Okulski said. “We are doing much better than we were back then.”
And that’s important, he said, when so many agencies and people depend on timely, accurate weather information.
“I can give people a head’s up two to four days in advance when things are going to get bad,” he said. “That allows towns and emergency managers to get their resources in place where they are most needed.”
There is a certain rush that comes with working during a major weather event, Okulski said, but that rush is always tempered by the reality of what weather can do to people.
“I worked in Memphis during a number of tornado outbreaks,” he said. “It’s exciting, but you also realize people’s lives are in danger.”
Once the blizzard storms into Maine, Okulski said the calm pace at the weather center will ramp up and additional staff will be on hand.
“We use social media, the computers [and] phone calls to get up-to-the-minute reports of what’s going on,” he said. “Then we can get that data out to the public.”
That information is available online at the NWS weather site and on its Facebook page.
Providing that information is something he takes seriously.
“It’s interesting being a scientist in a field that directly impacts people from what they wear, what they do outside, can they get to work,” Okulski said. “That’s because what people do in their professional and personal lives is related to weather events.”
