We briefed the team. “Hey, don’t go out of your hide site between this time and that time.” We kind of got the rolling eyes, “Okay, weather dude. Why?”

“That’s because that’s when we calculate dew formation time, based on the humidity and the temperature. And if you’re out and moving around during that time in the morning when the frost develops on the ground, they’ll be able to track you right back to your hide site.”

And that was a big light bulb above their heads moment. You could just see their eyes widen and the response was, “Okay, weather dude, that’s good information.”

I operated in several different environments during the time that I was in the Special Ops weather community. One of the most challenging areas, though, harkens back to our World War II origins in Yugoslavia. And the terrain in Yugoslavia is incredible, and it is actually the reason why, during World War II, we put guys on the ground in Yugoslavia as part of the OSS.

A lot of the missions that were being flown were canceled due to weather. A large number of the sorties had to turn around because they couldn’t find the drop zones. They couldn’t get to the airfields, they couldn’t land. Also of impact in that area, bombing missions were flown out of Italy to bomb the Ploiești oil fields in Romania. Those missions were also impacted by the weather.

So the determination was made that they were going to put guys on the ground in Yugoslavia. They had a lot of volunteers from the 19th Weather Squadron. These guys paved the way for us. They went through the OSS spy training, went through British Jump School. The 19th Weather Squadron, Parachute Detachment—which we have orders on and letterhead—was the first Air Force organized, trained, and equipped parachute unit.

They operated at Tito’s headquarters in Drvar for several months and as a result, the sortie rate increased by 70%. Weather data was coming out of an area that there was previously no data, and it was coming out several times a day. As a result, it significantly impacted both aviation operations for bombing missions and for airlift missions and resupply.

Everything that our guys are doing now has grown from that initial force in World War II on the SOF side and the conventional side. I think that it’s fantastic the resources that the guys of today have. I don’t believe that it’s possible for them to get too much information.

Weather is intel, and it involves doing everything that’s necessary for mission success. A lot of people don’t understand why there would ever be weather personnel—observers, forecasters, officers—that are jump qualified or freefall qualified. In order to support the mission, you need to know the mission. In order to know the mission, you need to be part of the mission. You need to be there.

It’s virtually impossible for somebody who’s sitting in Omaha doing remote support to understand the impact of the mission, having never been there. But if they don’t understand the tactical side and the real true impacts, it’s just not happening.

We ramped in, we got out of the airplane, you’re in the dark already. You’re in a dark room, and you open the room into an even darker room. That’s what it’s like jumping off the ramp of the airplane. Get under canopy and realize just from the wind on my face, I’m like, okay, this is not what I was anticipating. This is one of the things that we call blind drops.

My career as a Special Operations weatherman started at Fort Lewis, Washington with 1st Special Forces Group. And while I was there working in the weather station as an observer, I got to watch the 1st Special Forces Group’s Special Operations weather team. And I see them coming to the weather station, getting ready to go on a mission, and I’m sitting on my butt in the weather station, typing stuff on the machines to send it out while they’re going out to do cool stuff. So I was like, you know, those guys look like they’re having a lot more fun than I am. And so that’s what led to my transition to becoming a Special Operations weatherman.

An interesting example of a mission in which weather played a key role in making things happen would be the initial insertion of forces into Afghanistan at the beginning of the war. Our mission was to establish a usable desert landing strip to bring in some other forces, some Marine Corps folks.

When you’re in a foreign country like this, especially Afghanistan and a lot of the states that surround it, they don’t have meteorology. It’s not like you’re in The States that provide weather information into the network and everything else. In Afghanistan, there was nothing. We’ve already done a bunch of analysis, so we talk about the planning process. We already are pretty sure that we can land airplanes there. But just like anything else, got to get eyes on it to ensure it’s accurate.

We were jumping way heavy for the altitudes we’re jumping at. We weighed ourselves in—like I think I weighed in at 700 pounds total to parachute, I think is supposed to hold up to 460 pounds, right? So we’re going—we’re almost doubling what the parachute can hold. But again, we’re going to waive the risk because we need to get these guys on the ground.

That drop, being the crazy weather guy, and I’m like, “Holy crap, the winds are a lot higher than we thought,” because I can feel them. You know, under canopy I can feel the wind. Not just the dropping wind, but the wind coming, you know, horizontally. And I’m like, this is not going to be good.

So the landing was not my best. Like, guys missing kneecaps, freaking broke their ribs. You know, one guy burned off part of his face because he landed face first and got drug by his parachute. The model said the weather is good for static line drop. The weather wasn’t good for static line drop.

When I took my first reading, after everything else, I had a 20—I think it was a 27 knot wind gust happening on the ground at that location, right? So instantly that’s the first thing I’m telling my air traffic control guys, “Hey, winds are 27 knots from this direction,” you know, or you know, whatever it was like 15 gusting 27, you know, right down the LZ, which is perfect for the airplanes, but not so much for the parachutists that usually don’t go much above 13 knots, right, for a static line infiltration.

So, yeah, that’s why everybody was hurt. But so we get up, we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do. We’ve got to establish the LZ. Like it doesn’t matter that we’re injured. Unless you’re not able to walk or you’re not able to move, you’re getting this thing set up. You’re still mission focused. You’re not going to be sitting there crying and calling for medic or something like that. You can get up and move and do your job. So begin setting up the LZ, assessing it for landing capabilities and everything else, and bring in the aircraft.

When we go back and we talk about all that, it goes back to the meteorological side of this, which was, we did a blind drop and there was no collaborating information. So we’re using model data to make a decision about what the weather conditions were. We went in with what were basically false pretenses of what the weather conditions were going to be like on the ground.

Weather plays a role in everything that we do. When I was a young guy, we called it the “WET trilogy”. So it’s the weather, enemy, and terrain, right? Those three things are constants. No matter what you do, those are three things that are either going to work against you or for you.

But at the end of the day, one of the things that we see is, is that any time that you place weather as a secondary thought process, it bites us in the butt. It doesn’t matter where in the planning process you are. This needs to be included because it’s part of that WET trilogy. If you’re talking about the enemy and you’re talking about the terrain, you’re probably talking about the meteorology, the weather, because that’s part of the entire package.

Here I am in the mountains, climbing up. The rain just comes down. All of a sudden we can’t see. The radar can’t see. There’s a lot of turbulence. I’m having trouble just staying on the controls. I’ve got spatial disorientation. So you feel like you’re tipping end-over-end and side-to-side all at the same time. We are exchanging the controls back and forth about every 30 seconds because that’s all we can tolerate. You’ve got to trust the instruments. You’ve got to trust what you’re doing. Otherwise, you know, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.

You know, in aviation, military aviation in particular, we have what’s called a probable kill ratio. So, for example, a Stinger missile may have a 99% probable kill on a Chinook helicopter with no countermeasures, no tactics. Terrain and weather, we say that the ground has a PK of 100%. Rain that you can’t see through, fog, snow, you know, can really be a challenge, you know, and these are all things that the weather can really affect.

And a lot of times planning is the key. Like understanding where the weather phenomena are, how they affect your particular aircraft or mission. You know, because the aircraft might be able to get somewhere based on the equipment that’s inside. But once you get there, can you do the mission?

I refer constantly back to the early 2001 timeframe right after 9/11, and our responsibility is to fly Special Forces teams or ODAs—ODA 595, later known as the Horse Soldiers, into Afghanistan, to link them up with what we call the Northern Alliance. And then they would, you know, help them to fight the Taliban. And once the Taliban is diminished, we can get to Osama Bin Laden.

And we originally were supposed to have two aircraft to take the 12-man team into Afghanistan, and one of the aircraft was drawn off on a separate mission, leaving me with one Chinook and the entire team. So we stripped the aircraft of armor to save weight. We had to do air refueling on the way in and the way out, which we normally did not like to do.

And almost immediately we cannot see out the window. And the weather forecast was supposed to be decent and I should be able to see 10–20 miles. And I can’t see the tip of the refueling probe, which is only about 19 feet long. So I’ve got the battalion commander, colonel, in my jump seat. He’s sitting, you know, about half a foot behind me and his knees are up against my thigh and he’s like, “Al, what do you want to do?” And I said, “Oh, sir, we just,” I said, “We TF.” So TF is Terrain Following radar. And the colonel said, “Yes, do it.” What I didn’t know was the Secretary of Defense had called earlier and told them to get in no matter what.

And we’re flying along. You can’t see outside. We’re approaching the mountains now, and we make our first turn into the mountains. And we had not planned on using the radar for this. And the radar sees about 10–20 miles ahead. And if you’re going to turn into the terrain, it’s going to see a mountain you plan on not going over. And it gives you what’s called a full climb command. I’m not expecting this climb command. So now I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.

And then the radar reboots on its own, and then it just goes, pfft. If you look straight up through the what we call the eyebrow light window, you can see stars, but below us to our front and just above where we need to see, can’t see anything. So I’m, you know, pulling circuit breakers and resetting things. And we get it back and I start cycling through the map displays to see what are we commanding off of. And I see, oh, there’s a, you know, 12–13,000 foot mountain in front of us. So we just turned the aircraft slightly to the right. The radar lets us down, we go around it and off we go.

Now I still got to get to the target. We come over the final ridgeline, we’re still in the clouds on the radar, and we can’t go past the landing area because there’s an anti-aircraft gun on the other side of a little nub, a little hill. If he sees me, he’s going to turn us into Swiss cheese.

You know, I talk about sometimes using the weather to your advantage. They can hear you, they know you’re there. That’s fine. But if they can’t see you, they can’t shoot you. And we’re expecting what’s called a brownout landing, a loss of visual reference. So we know that when we come in and we pull power to cushion to stop the descent, the rotor wash is going to roil up this cloud of dust.

So my copilot is doing that. Except I can feel that we’re drifting backwards, right. This is me feeling it. And I look at the hover symbology and we are indeed going backwards. And we’re only about 10 feet off the ground. And about that time I feel the aft gear touch the ground as we’re backing up. And I pushed down on the power, so the forward gear comes down and land, we stop, the dust kind of settles, and we’re surrounded by Afghan forces, right. And at the time, you didn’t know these Taliban, are they Northern Alliance, you can only go with what you were told. And these are supposed to be friendlies.

And as the dust went down, we lowered the ramp. Ground Force gets out, the SF team, they meet up with the leader and he looks back, gives me a thumbs up. I’m like, all right, they’re good. So we take off and we retrace our steps doing the same thing.

And then we did that. Unlike in the movie, we did it night, after night, after night, with new teams, and each time we learned a little lesson about the terrain and weather that really over the next 10–15 years, those initial missions and the weather we encountered set the tone for the fight.

Weather prediction usually works by running physics models on supercomputers that look at very broad regions of the planet, and they’re remarkably good at the big picture. They’ll tell us days ahead that a cold front is moving across the state.

But those models think in big units: grids miles wide and time in hours. So answering the question that people ask most, “Is it going to rain right here in the next ten minutes?” takes a completely different approach.

For minute-by-minute forecasting, we set the big simulation models aside and focus on what meteorologists call radar advection or “nowcasting.” We also refer to it as “minutely” forecasting.

We use the current radar to locate the precipitation, calculate the speed and direction it’s moving, and mathematically determine where and how heavy it will be at any given location in real time. Because it’s built on what’s actually happening right now, it’s extremely accurate in the short term.

But watching only gets you so far, and radar advection accuracy begins to sharply diminish beyond 60 minutes. For example, a single radar scan can’t see a storm that hasn’t formed yet or a cell that’s about to collapse.

So right around the one-hour mark, our system makes a handoff — like one runner passing the baton to the next. The live radar tracking blends into our high-resolution global model, GRAF^Ⓡ, which brings atmospheric physics into play. Merging real-time observation with physics lets us carry an accurate, minute-by-minute forecast all the way out to the 90-minute mark.

Minute-by-minute forecasting isn’t about putting more data on a screen. It’s knowing when to track a storm by watching it, when to bring in the physics models, and how to filter out the noise so what you see is something you can actually plan around.

Before we put a rain alert on your screen, our system cross-checks the radar against several meteorological conditions. If those conditions are not met, we suppress the precipitation alerts. 

Reach out to learn more about “minutely” forecasting, precipitation alerts, and the science behind all of our efforts to bring you the most accurate weather data possible.