County meteorologist to give forecasting lessons

PRESQUE ISLE – Have you ever looked to the skies and noticed jet contrails crisscrossing the upper atmosphere?

That, Ted Shapiro says, is a clue that precipitation could be coming in the next day or two.

You see, he explained, when the contrails don’t evaporate quickly, it’s a sign that moisture is increasing in the high levels of the atmosphere. That could mean a low pressure system is moving in. And that could mean rain or snow in less than 48 hours.

Anyone, Shapiro said, can decipher the clues to make short-range weather forecasts.

The chief meteorologist at WAGM-TV, the local television station, will be teaching people how to do just that as he leads an introduction to meteorology course at Northern Maine Community College during the spring semester.

Shapiro, who taught nearly 20 meteorology courses at Husson College in Bangor before moving to northern Maine, said Tuesday that he is teaching the field course in weather observation to get people of all ages outside and looking up at the sky.

“My real reason to teach this class is my hope that this knowledge will be passed on to younger people,” he said. “What I want to see happen is for this to get kids away from the video games and the text messaging, and to get them outside and teach them a skill that’s really useful.”

While the course is being offered at the college level, Shapiro said he hoped adults who take the course will get the young people in their lives involved in helping to gather weather data and make predictions.

During the course, Shapiro will teach students about weather phenomena and how weather is predicted. Students will learn about the water cycle, how the sun affects the weather, atmospheric circulation, and cloud formation and identification. They also will learn how to make weather assumptions based on observations of temperature, pressure, humidity, wind direction and sky cover.

Shapiro said he’s been teaching people all about the weather since 2000. He first began teaching weather courses when he worked as a meteorologist for Channel 7 in Bangor. He said when he took the job at WAGM-TV this fall, he reached out to NMCC to keep that day-to-day interaction going in an educational forum. Shapiro said there are plans in the works for him to offer a similar course at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in the fall of 2007.

For now, he is excited about offering his first course in northern Maine.

“I am fascinated by the ever-changing palette of the sky,” he said. “I love to share the readily available clues that Mother Nature provides about how the weather will play out over the next day or two.”