Old trivia time

[Tim Vasquez]

A bit of trivia: any old-timey chasers remember this bizarre phrase and where it came from? The error was quite common, and some of you might be able to guess what caused it.

[Computer voice reads the following]
"Midland, 5000 scattered, 10000 broken, visibility 7, temperature 72, altimeter 2999. Remarks, hail and snow north."

I'll add an interesting story about this tomorrow.

Tim

 

[Jeff Wear]

I think the "hail and snow north" came from the decoder seeing "AS N" in the remarks and thinking it meant "hail and snow north" instead of "altostratus north", right?

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Yes, absolutely, that's altostratus north.

This came from IVRS (Interim Voice Response System), which the FAA ran from about 1987 to 1990. In most major cities you could dial in, and through a touchtone system get observations by entering the station identifier on the keypad. Obviously this was great for those of us who did not have an Accu-Data subscription or immediate access to a computer. It was absolutely free, and I plotted many, many surface charts using IVRS.

Even on a chase you could stop in someplace like Amarillo or Wichita Falls and get the latest observations, with no computer. Great technology for the 1980s, and not well-known either.

Interestingly it had the FDUS winds aloft, which means you could plot a pseudo- forecast sounding. I stopped doing it pretty quickly, though, as I found the temperature curves in FDUS data were excessively smoothed.

Tim