Collegiate Times

A new meteorology degree program, the first in Virginia, is forecasted to expand the relationship between Virginia Tech and Blacksburg’s National Weather Service office.

Blacksburg’s NWS office is responsible for providing weather data, forecasts and alerts to an area covering 40 counties in three states, and is one of 122 in America.

Half of the NWS offices were closed in the 1990s and the remaining offices replaced their outdated World War II-era equipment with advanced satellite and Doppler radar technology. The Lynchburg and Roanoke offices were shut down and replaced by the Blacksburg location because of Tech’s potential for a meteorological program.

Many NWS offices are co-located with universities that have meteorological programs because the relationship is mutually beneficial. Tech will model its degree on those programs.

“Our co-location with the university will benefit their future program because we intend to integrate what we have available here as a learning experience with their developing curriculum,” said David Wert, the meteorologist-in-charge at Blacksburg’s NWS office.

Internships at the NWS will be used as an opportunity for students to apply what they have learned in the classrooms to real forecasting experiences.

“It gives the students a real look at operational meteorology, of what goes on behind the scenes — not only during significant weather events but also the day-to-day operations of what these people do,” said David Carroll, an instructor in the geography department. “It’s great exposure career-wise.”

Carroll currently teaches most of the meteorology classes at Tech and is involved with starting the new degree program.

Wert said the technology used by the NWS is state-of-the-art and capable of integrating data received from a variety of sources including satellites and Doppler radar to create a variety of weather models.

“If we see a significant weather event, say a thunderstorm that’s moving, we can click on that storm, it will give us an extrapolation as to how that storm is expected to move, and we can highlight or identify an area that we want to warn and it will automatically ingest all of that background information, towns that are in the path, times of arrival or any significant geographic point and automatically put that into the warning,” Wert said.

He said the system can be used to send alerts to the website or personal NOAA radios instantly, and that they had been able to warn local counties of the recent tornado threat ahead of time.

“These tools are very robust, and it allows us to basically spend our time (as the) meteorologists and scientists that we’re hired to be as opposed to clerks,” Wert said.

Students will play an active part in this process, and because of this the geography department and the NWS only plan to involve the top students who have completed the required courses and know what they are doing.

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A version of this article appeared in the Apr 19 issue of the Collegiate Times.