Is Forecasting A Common Good, Or A Commodity?
Out on the runway, near the edge of taxiway DD, “the machine”—a ceilometer— sits on a small patch of grass, burnt to brown by jet exhaust. It measures cloud cover, but only directly above the airport. Even if the thickest fog bank were rolling in from the west, over Manhattan, the ceilometer wouldn’t register it until it arrived. That’s where Sauer comes in. La Guardia is one of 135 airports around the U.S. with a human weather observer, there to back up a suite of instruments known as an Automated Surface Observing System, or ASOS. Sauer watches the weather, and he watches these machines that watch the weather. Once each hour—more often, in poor conditions— he runs up to the roof, looks at the sky and then checks what he sees against what the machines have registered. With a few keystrokes at an old terminal, he changes the numbers. Rather than a single layer of scattered clouds at 8,000 ft., he sees three. “I did not accept the output from the automated system because it was not completely accurate,” he says. “I backed up the sky.”
この記事は Time の July 8, 2019 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Time の July 8, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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