“It wasn’t so much the sandstorm to the south as the gusty winds and low ceiling to the north that kept us on pins and needles,” explains Air Force Capt. Mark Coggins, 35, one of about 500 deployed weather forecasters.
It may seem folly to trust military victory to a weatherman. But World War II buffs know that D-Day depended on a fateful forecast. And military forecasters are different creatures than the TV anchors who tell you skies are clear when you can hear thunderclouds clapping overhead. Coggins, who works in the Joint Operations Center (JOC) here at Central Command in Qatar, has his finger on probably the world’s most specific weather report: the Joint Operation Area Forecast.
This five-day forecast culls information from myriad satellites high above the earth all the way down to satellite-phone calls from grunts monitoring conditions on the ground. It’s much more precise than “partly cloudy.” The JOAF tells cloud height to the foot, visibility to the meter, wind speed to the knot–anything that could affect battle. Coggins is constantly being called on to give his assessment. “Hey weather!” the other JOC-kies will shout.
Last week, everyone was watching the storm front moving across Syria as if it were an advancing army. Gen. Tommy Franks was getting frequent weather briefings, as was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. President George W. Bush has been tracking the weather closely, too. He is a bit of a Weather Channel junkie. Like many Texans, he frequently monitors the rainfall at his ranch.
The “storm of the year,” as they are calling it here, made for dramatic viewing. Five days before some 1,000 paratroopers landed in Northern Iraq, things looked grim. “There was more than a little bit of concern whether the jump could go as planned,” says Coggins, who hails from Odessa, Texas, right next to Bush’s hometown. “We were watching that system that brought sand to the south and two inches of snow on the ground to the north.”
But the paratroopers’ weatherman put his faith in the forecast. The military has been tracking meteorological data on Iraq since 1991, so it is quite extensive. According to his read of it, there would be a three-hour window while the front was passing when the snow would stop, the clouds would clear and the wind would die down. This was four days out. “He made a spectacular weather call,” Coggins explains. “There was plenty of stress from that point on, giving the green light in weather that would barely be good enough.”
The day of the parachute drop arrived. Back in Omaha, Neb., at something called the Special Operations Forces Weather Operations Cell, Lou Riva was staying late into the evening. His is one of the many sources of weather information that streams into the JOC and then out into the field. He had been on secret e-mail chats about the jump all week. A half an hour before the drop, the winds were still strong and visibility still low. The plane of paratroopers had left about an hour before–flying on the word of their weatherman.
Meanwhile, Riva sent a reassuring message to the secure chat room: “Stay with it. It’s going to come right up.” And it did, just as it was forecast. “It was like we were fortune tellers. It became beautiful, crisp and clear. The snowfall had pulled the dust out of the air,” Coggins says. The snow cushioned the fall of some 1,000 paratroopers. No one was injured. “That staff sergeant, whoever that guy is who made the call with the tactical unit, that guy looks like a god.” If only your local weatherman were as divine.
