WW2 Meteorology | Hacker News Reader

WW2 Meteorology

rafmetman.wordpress.com

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The German side was also starved for weather data. And since weather tends to flow West to East over the Atlantic, they were even more disadvantaged.

Interesting solution was un-manned, automated weather stations like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Station_Kurt -- installed secretly by U-Boat on Labrador's north coast. It was re-discovered in 1977!

God damn it all to hell and back I miss my old man. He joined the Army Air Corps and was stationed in Brazil. He flew in B25s on weather missions across the Atlantic to North Africa.

After the war he worked for the weather service which morphed into NOAA.

He had satellite images transmitted on Alden fax machines of the naval buildup around Cuba during the missile crises. The FBI interviewed him- ur uh threatened him on national security grounds.

He met my mom at Homestead air base in south FLA. my maternal side. all fought in WW2 as well.

It seemed everyone contributed a little. It was clear who was right and who was wrong. Those distinctions are less clear these days

> It was clear who was right and who was wrong

I think depended on which side you were on, as it wasn’t always simple. I’m sure many of those on the wrong side didn’t see it how you do.

Follow Russia’s course through the war, or France (keeping in mind that the Vichy existed). There were factions all over the place and simplifying it down to right/wrong is too simplistic.

Perhaps one could say, "It was clear who was right and who was wrong--whichever side you were on, that side was right and the other side was wrong" whichever struggle is being considered. Whichever faction you identified with was right, just like now.

Even just looking at the Cold War period, this still doesn’t quite cover the complexities. There was an entire anti-war movement full of folks who thought the US should pull out of Vietnam without necessarily supporting the other side of that conflict/war.

Thinking of every side as equivalent is to overly simplify history. Many older Germans were scared as fuck by the fascist’s brutal tactics taking over the country. Secret police rounding people up who spoke out meant people would simply disappear and you wouldn’t know if they would come back.

That’s not that one side was some paragon of virtue and the other pure evil. Stalin wasn’t a nice fella just because he was fighting Nazi. However, there was significant differences between American interment camps and their German or Japanese equivalents etc.

> simplifying [World War 2] down to right/wrong is too simplistic.

That is some truly incredible mental gymnastics.

It doesn't take mental gymnastics to understand nuance and complexity

> It was clear who was right and who was wrong. Those distinctions are less clear these days

In the 1940s the US was still an apartheid country lynching black citizens.

You’re not wrong, and I hate to defend the US but, come on. The Holocaust is on a whole other level.

I agree.

The Good War by Studs Terkel offers interesting perspectives on WW2, relies on interviews with citizens of America who lived through the times.

My grandfather was a meteorologist stationed in the Pacific during WWII. He claimed that he was asked for a weather report for Hiroshima for the day the first bomb was dropped. He didn't know why they wanted the weather report. He also claimed he saw either the Enola Gay or a decoy on his island before the bomb was dropped. I never knew him to lie about anything else, so maybe he was telling the truth.

The flights had secondary targets e.g. Kokura was saved by the weather (leading to the bombing of Nagasaki)

Also likely sparing the life of Ted Fujita, whose study of the damage of the bombings later informed his work on downdrafts and microbursts.

This is very interesting but, and I'm afraid this might be off topic and pedantic, I had to stop reading because Words, maybe only Nouns, were frequently Cased and Bolded (does bold formatting exist on HN?) which made it very hard for Me to Read and Parse as I kept thinking Things were Proper Names or Titles. Is there a Reason for this Style that I am ignorant of?

I found this very annoying too, and thought these were links at first. It can be fixed with:

  Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("strong")).forEach(strong => strong.style = "font-weight: normal;")

in the developer console

..when consuming from a desktop browser

paste it with a prepended JavaScript: into the URL bar.

Had no idea it was that easy to run arbitrary JavaScript on a mobile web browser. Thanks.

not working here

Once you have loaded the page, paste exactly the following into the address bar:

javascript:Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("strong")).forEach(strong => strong.style = "font-weight: normal;")

Safari will refuse and give an error pop up. Chrome will remove “javascript:” from the beginning if you paste, to prevent users from accidentally running arbitrary JS. You can type it back in by hand, and then it will work.

It reminds me of "dyslexic friendly" font that bold some letter in a word, claiming that it'll help the dyslexic read. It also makes it very hard for me to *re*ad and *pa*rse.

Came here to say this: it's extremely distracting, I struggle to reason why they would do this.

Meterologist. This was my dream job as an 8th grader.

I used to read a 1-minute weather report everyday after someone else did a 5-min news during the morning school assembly.

The weather report was collected from my Geography teacher. He had a weather vane, a hygrometer, a thermometer, and a rain gauge in his porch.

I remember these symbols--though, I never used it, but the weather chart that Mr Sanwal showed had these markings.

I've rarely seen it referred to as "WW2", as opposed to "WWII", but apparently it's been in relatively rare but consistent use in English [1] for a long time.

Tweaking the query reveals that it's relatively more common in British English than English overall, although "WWII" is more common there overall as well.

1. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=WWII%2CWW2%2CW...

2. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=WWII%2CWW2%2CW...

> I've rarely seen it referred to as "WW2", as opposed to "WWII",

I'm an older Brit and had to think about this one but it's usually been WW2 as far as I can remember. I think the WWII is perhaps more recent or American usage.

I've just had a look and The Commonwealth War Graves Commission refers to it as WW2, or in words as "World War Two" / "Second World War"

https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-ww2-war-graves/

Himmler et al. were believers in the World Ice Theory, championed by Scultetus in the SS. His popularity oscilated but at various points they were trying to use his ideas to predict the weather.

The basic idea of the World Ice Theory is that a star filled with water crashed into our sun, exploding and spewing out water, hydrogen and such, which froze and coalesced into planets. Many of these planets impacted the Earth, leading to different types of rock formations (because rocks are made of ice, explosions changed the soil composition like during periods of greater volcanic activity or or or... subtheories abounded.) Noah's flood was caused by such an ice planet turning into hail in the atmosphere.

Tangentially, the Nazis also sent a few meteorological and astronomical teams hoping to see the other side of the Earth according to the hollow Earth theory.

I wonder if this was the inspiration for the UK side story about "Qwghlm" in Cryptonomicon

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