Poems by Ann Spiers
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Weather Station on a Plain
by Ann Spiers
From Canary Summer 2019
Ann lives on Puget Sound in Vashon Island's Ellisport Creek watershed.
My dad discovers gold in an aerosol can.
Like Midas, he gilds all. The ozone thins.
I ride my golden bike, my skin bronzing
under the ultraviolet rays of the sun.
Above my poem, “Weather Station on a Plain,” is an icon from the International Weather Symbols. This poem belongs to a cycle in which the poems also use symbols from the same coding system. These symbols exist for many categories depicting the surface weather, such as the other types of weather stations (Deep Valley, Coast, Plain) and those that show the amount and intensity of drizzle, fog, rain, and thunder. My hope is that the symbols inject each poem with depth, counterpoint, and link to specific climate phenomena as the poem details today’s climate crisis.
The International Weather Symbols are the visual code used to map surface climate conditions observed at local weather stations worldwide. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) oversees this coding system. The data illustrated include cloud type and cover, temperature, precipitation, wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, precipitation type and amount. Plotted on a page, the visuals use a prescribed placement of symbols outside a central circle to record surface weather conditions at one time and one place.
The complexity of the maps ranges from eight to many notations, depending on the station’s purpose and instrumentation. Observations are made once or twice a day or, given today’s capabilities, second to second.
These stationary weather stations, numbering in the tens of thousands, are sited in citizen scientists’ backyards and fields, on sea buoys and ships, and at universities and meteorological institutions. Making further data available for surface weather maps are today’s computer systems and software, affordable instrumentation, open reporting systems, satellites, and GIS. Weather hobbyists have always been the most numerous data recorders and sharers. The data are used for research as well as by airplane pilots, sea captains, ground transports, and citizens to chart the safest course.
In the mid-1800s, inventors added to the collection of instruments measuring weather. This growing ability to gather weather data was available and affordable, as it is today, to both amateur and professional weather watchers. In the 1840s, weather watchers used another new invention, the telegraph, to transmit observations to regional, national, and global agencies. Combined, the data produce weather maps of wider geographical areas. With the new source of data, newspapers printed weather maps; weather forecasting emerged from the compilations. By 1941, global consensus was reached on the symbols and their meanings. On-line now, numerous networks collect the surface-weather reports.
Today globally, surface-weather maps indicate that climate warming occurs based on the local weather stations’ very local data. Debate rages about the data’s accuracy from the thousands of worldwide stations.
For an example of the weather station maps, see https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/stationplot.shtml
© Ann Spiers
Weather Station on the Coast
by Ann Spiers
We forget how a sea can be.
No wind to tap the waves into crests.
No crests to break on the steepening beach.
No northering velella towing spring.
© Ann Spiers