ArchiveFM

Radiolab

The Weather Report

Meteorologists are as common as the clouds these days. Rolling onto the airwaves at morning, noon and night they tell us what to wear and where to plan our picnics. They’re local celebrities with an outsized influence. But in the 1940s, there was really only one of them: Irving P. Krick. He was suave and dapper, with the charm of a sunbeam and the boldness of a thunderclap. He was a salesman who turned the weather into a product. Today, listen to the story of Krick and his descendants, a crew of profit prophets who have found fame and fortune staring at the sky and seeing the future. We follow them from the bloody beaches of World War II to the climate changed coasts of today, exploring their impact and predicting what they’ll mean in our wackier weather world.  Special Thanks:Special thanks to Xandra Clark, Homa Sarabi, Santi Dharmawan, Francisco Alvarez, Maureen O’Leary and everyone at NOAA, Shimon Elkabetz, Jack Neff, Joe Pennington, Brad Colman, Morgan Yarker, Megan Walker, Eric Bramford, Jay Cohen and Irving Krick Jr for supplying us with tons of great archival footage and audio.  Episode Credits: Reported by Simon Adler and Annie McEwenProduced by Annie McEwen and Simon AdlerSound & Music by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen and Jeremy BloomMixing help from Arianne WackFact-checking by Diane KellyEdited by Soren Wheeler Citations: Books:  If you’re curious to know more about the history of weather forecasting, go check out Kris Harper’s book Weather by the Numbers. Video: We also asked Illustrator and Animator Sophia Twigt to make a little video explaining how the U.S. government agency NOAA collects and treats weather data to make weather forecasts. Here it is, narrated by Simon Adler. We hope you enjoy it:   Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Duration
55m
Broadcast on
28 Oct 2022
Audio Format
other

Meteorologists are as common as the clouds these days. Rolling onto the airwaves at morning, noon and night they tell us what to wear and where to plan our picnics. They’re local celebrities with an outsized influence. But in the 1940s, there was really only one of them: Irving P. Krick. He was suave and dapper, with the charm of a sunbeam and the boldness of a thunderclap. He was a salesman who turned the weather into a product.

Today, listen to the story of Krick and his descendants, a crew of profit prophets who have found fame and fortune staring at the sky and seeing the future. We follow them from the bloody beaches of World War II to the climate changed coasts of today, exploring their impact and predicting what they’ll mean in our wackier weather world. 

Special Thanks:Special thanks to Xandra Clark, Homa Sarabi, Santi Dharmawan, Francisco Alvarez, Maureen O’Leary and everyone at NOAA, Shimon Elkabetz, Jack Neff, Joe Pennington, Brad Colman, Morgan Yarker, Megan Walker, Eric Bramford, Jay Cohen and Irving Krick Jr for supplying us with tons of great archival footage and audio. 

Episode Credits:

Reported by Simon Adler and Annie McEwenProduced by Annie McEwen and Simon AdlerSound & Music by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen and Jeremy BloomMixing help from Arianne WackFact-checking by Diane KellyEdited by Soren Wheeler

Citations:

Books: 

If you’re curious to know more about the history of weather forecasting, go check out Kris Harper’s book Weather by the Numbers.

Video:

We also asked Illustrator and Animator Sophia Twigt to make a little video explaining how the U.S. government agency NOAA collects and treats weather data to make weather forecasts. Here it is, narrated by Simon Adler. We hope you enjoy it:

 

Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Hi, I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Lottef Nasser. This is Radio Lab. And today we find out whether the future of our society is best off in the hands of government science done for the public good or big business out to make a buck. It comes to us from our boarder Simon Adler and Annie McKeown. OK, the only thing I'm going to ask Annie is that you stay like right up on your mic. Yeah, OK, Simon. Not a problem. OK, so we're here to talk to you guys about the thing you talk about when you don't know what else to talk about, which is the weather. That's great. But, while talking about the weather might be the smallest of small talk, we're going to start with the story where it was anything but. It's early June 1944. World War II is raging. And the Allies. They're getting ready for Operation Overlord, which is the D-Day landing. The largest invasion in human history. And not to put it to find a point on it, they were dealing with really crappy weather. Big swells, strong winds, rain. This by the way is meteorologist and historian Chris Harper, professor at the University of Copenhagen. And she says the weather was so bad that Eisenhower was concerned they might not be able to do the invasion at all. Are we going to have to postpone this by two weeks? If we have to postpone this by two weeks or a month, then like, we've amassed all of these troops, like the element of surprise goes out the window. And so, Eisenhower needed to know when there would be some calm periods, some breaks, so that they could go ahead and make the landing. He needed a forecast. And, I mean, there were only a handful of meteorologists in the military. And so, he grabbed who he could get, this tall dapper man, Irving P. Crick. The Eisenhower needed to forecast out a week in advance in order to do this. This is him in an old TV interview, and in it, sporting this white shock of hair hunched over a desk covered with weather maps. There was the maps from the fifth and sixth of June 1944. He says he was told to make this impossibly high stakes forecast. Literally life and death, like if the waves are too big, one of those boats is going to capsize and all those people are going to drown. Why? Of course, he said, "Now, if you guys are right, we'll all be heroes, and it's the best, we'll all be privates." And eventually, June 6, 1944, and when that date arrived, Don, the channel is the scene of the greatest armada ever of some. What kind of a day was it? Well, it was a day in which every element of the combat team, the amphibious forces, the gliders, the bombers, everyone could operate. And it was bad up around Calais, where the Germans thought we were going to land, which

Transcription truncated.

Meteorologists are as common as the clouds these days. Rolling onto the airwaves at morning, noon and night they tell us what to wear and where to plan our picnics. They’re local celebrities with an outsized influence. But in the 1940s, there was really only one of them: Irving P. Krick. He was suave and dapper, with the charm of a sunbeam and the boldness of a thunderclap. He was a salesman who turned the weather into a product. Today, listen to the story of Krick and his descendants, a crew of profit prophets who have found fame and fortune staring at the sky and seeing the future. We follow them from the bloody beaches of World War II to the climate changed coasts of today, exploring their impact and predicting what they’ll mean in our wackier weather world.  Special Thanks:Special thanks to Xandra Clark, Homa Sarabi, Santi Dharmawan, Francisco Alvarez, Maureen O’Leary and everyone at NOAA, Shimon Elkabetz, Jack Neff, Joe Pennington, Brad Colman, Morgan Yarker, Megan Walker, Eric Bramford, Jay Cohen and Irving Krick Jr for supplying us with tons of great archival footage and audio.  Episode Credits: Reported by Simon Adler and Annie McEwenProduced by Annie McEwen and Simon AdlerSound & Music by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen and Jeremy BloomMixing help from Arianne WackFact-checking by Diane KellyEdited by Soren Wheeler Citations: Books:  If you’re curious to know more about the history of weather forecasting, go check out Kris Harper’s book Weather by the Numbers. Video: We also asked Illustrator and Animator Sophia Twigt to make a little video explaining how the U.S. government agency NOAA collects and treats weather data to make weather forecasts. Here it is, narrated by Simon Adler. We hope you enjoy it:   Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.