Vernon
Q ..
So that all feeds into the reservoir management that you talked about before.
From all that data, then they can do a real good job. It's really the Weather Service's job
A
to alert people as far as potential flooding and all that, but a lot of theinformation they get
from the Corps of E n g i n e e r s and f r o m the Geological Survey.
But the Corps was one of the first agencies to have satellite-type data information. W e got
involved in it more, spent more money on it than anybody else too, probably at the very
beginning. Then pretty soon, all the agencies started getting into it. Some of the agencies
would go together and have a downlink or a common downlink where they'd all get data.
One of the big advantages to the Corps of Engineers and to the Weather Service was that
in some of our offices we were co-located in the same building. We had a water control
center and the Weather Service office in the same building, with one on one floor and
another on another floor. So they had ready access to each other's information all the
time.
The Weather Service could come down in the North Pacific Division [Portland, Oregon],
in the customs building there. The Weather Service could come and find out what kind
of reservoir regulation changes our people were making whenever they changed the
releases from our reservoir or Weather Service would know about it right away. Well,
I'm sure they still have all these things.
But they had a briefing room where everyday, sometimes during a flood emergency, more
than once a day, the Weather Service and the Corps would all get together in the briefing
room and they would be hooked up with the district offices so that the district offices could
report information in. They had computer hookups so that they could show things on a
screen computer on each of the district offices and in the division. They could share
information by computers and so forth.
But it was a real great asset to be able to have all this information in one place and to be
able to make decisions much better and get information. The Weather Service could get
information to the general public much quicker and with a much more accurate forecast
then they might have if had to do otherwise.
Modeling and Predictions
Q ..
That kind of data then was all used in your modeling and all your predictions, and things
like that?
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