TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- With cutting edge technology and the highest weather prediction accuracy rate within Air Force Materiel Command, Tinker Air Force Base’s 72nd Operations Support Squadron’s Weather Flight plays a vital role in protecting Tinker’s assets and personnel during Oklahoma’s severe weather.
But this wasn’t the case for the Weather Flight more than 70 years ago when Maj. Ernest J. Fawbush and Capt. Robert C. Miller made history by issuing the nation’s first tornado warning at Tinker in 1948.
“To obtain real time weather data that would require someone to go outside with equipment to measure the temperature, dew-point and winds and reading a barometer normally mounted in the weather station to obtain surface pressure,” said Senior Master Sgt. Philip Mohr, 72nd Operations Support Squadron Weather Flight chief. “They would then take that information in addition to other weather sites’ observations though the United States to hand analyze and build surface weather charts.”
For Fawbush and Miller, most forecasters of their time relied on hand-drawn weather maps, weather balloons and a radar system originally intended and used as a bomb radar on B-29s in World War II.
Despite these conditions, both Airmen still managed to pull together an accurate tornado forecast on March 25, 1948, based on similar conditions the meteorologists had witnessed during another tornado that had struck the base only six days prior.
Today, Tinker’s Weather Flight operates with an entirely different set of technology centered around the Air Force’s premier forecasting model, the Global Air-Land Weather Exploitation Model.
Based on the United Kingdom Met Office’s Unified Model, GALWEM was first implemented as the Air Force’s primary weather model to meet the warfighter’s global requirements in 2015. Along with GALWEM, Mohr said that Tinker’s meteorologists are constantly considering other models as well to ensure they have the most accurate forecasts.
“We conduct a practice called initialization verification of models and it’s basically a look at the models, satellite and weather on the surface to see which one is performing the best,” Mohr said. “Sometimes we’ll pick and choose between the different models based on whether or not one is doing better at forecasting clouds, temperatures, turbulence and whatnot.”
Along with observing weather conditions and keeping the base informed of any potential hazardous weather, a large part of the Weather Flight’s job is providing weather briefs for aircraft coming and going from the installation.
These mission execution forecasts provide vital weather data not only for Tinker’s own fleet of Boeing E-3 Sentries and other aircraft, but also for transient aircraft in the area. These briefings provide in-depth forecasts for the weather along the aircrafts’ flight paths and the Weather Flight has the ability to provide real-time updates to aircraft via radio.
To ensure that their meteorologists are trained to forecast in Oklahoma’s severe weather climate, the Flight holds annual radar training with models of major previous severe weather events.
“We do scenarios over real-world situations like the 1999 Moore tornado. We train our forecasters to recognize the signs of severe weather on the radar, react quickly, and know when to issue a severe weather warning for Tinker Air Force Base before inclement weather hits,” said Capt. John Martin, 72nd Operations Support Squadron Weather Flight Commander. “We’re all just trying to get an edge, so that when our forecasters see it in real-time, they know they’ve run through it before and can identify what signs to look for.”