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Top Secret Weather
Thu Aug 18, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
If you were a weather addict in 1942, you'd have gone through some serious withdrawal. That's because World War II brought on the most severe limits on weather news in our nation's history. The limited weather diet of the 1940s got cut to the bare minimum by the Office of Censorship.
If the Nazis had known the weather across the U.S., it might have helped them plan operations in Europe a day or two later. So keeping our lips sealed was critical to the war effort--so important, in fact, that weather was the first item listed in the censors' guide for the press.
Newspapers were allowed to print the previous day's high and low--but for only 20 cities max. And the local forecasts had to stay pretty vague. Instead of giving tomorrow's high, the paper might say "little change in temperature." Radio was muzzled even more tightly. All regular weathercasts were dropped for nearly two years. Even sportscasters weren't allowed to say if a baseball game was cancelled due to rain. One reporter got around that rule by saying, "whatever has caused the delay is also making the spectators go back for cover."
By 1944, the military threat was shifting to the Pacific. Since weather tends to move from west to east, it wasn't so critical to keep weather news off the air. A couple of years later, things were back to normal. Once again, weather hounds could get their detailed forecast, with highs and lows extending all the way out, well, to about two days.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by Subaru of America and the National Science Foundation. Thanks today to meteorologist and writer Bob Henson of Boulder, Colorado.
Today's Links
NOAA History
http://www.history.noaa.gov/
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