21 April 2010
The Baghdad 7 Day
Posted by Dan Satterfield
Earlier this week I received an email from local Huntsville Police officer Michael Nelson.
Here it is:
Good morning
I am Michael Nelson, I am a Police Officer with the City of Huntsville, and have been deployed to Iraq with the National Guard. One of my jobs here in Iraq is to report to my commander with the weather here from the Staff Weather Office. Unfortunately, their forecasts here don’t work out to well. Most of my unit is from Huntsville, and I thought it would be a treat if you could do a weather forecast on video for the Baghdad area and send it over on email. I’m not asking for a lot of forecasts, just one to break up to the monotony here in Iraq. Let me know if this is possible. I appreciate it. Have a great one!
Michael Nelson
So with quite a bit of added work to the daily routine and and my assistant and I starting an hour ahead of schedule, we managed to help! A lot less model data and satellite imagery available for Iraq, but I think this forecast will be decent.
[QUICKTIME http://www.wildwildweather.com/movie/6pmIraq.m4v 640 360]
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
That was great…
Leave it to my husband to come up with a clever way to bring the 441st closer to home! We’re proud of you guys! Hope you enjoy the sunshine before it gets too hot!
We were honoured to do it Jana. It was a tough forecast- I can sympathise with the forecasters over there. I have read about their difficulties and done a few of their training modules.