IS FORECASTING A COMMON GOOD,
OR A COMMODITY? BY ANDREW BLUM
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dont let this printPaul Sauer SPinS hiS head like a hawk, Standing on the roof of
the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia Airport, as jets whine and fume
on the tarmac below. “Pretty straightforward today,” he shouts. “A little
strato cumulus to the north. A little bit of middle clouds, which is still mov-
ing through us to the south. And a little bit of cirrus above that.” He turns
on his heels and heads back down to his office, one floor below. “The ma-
chine is not going to see that,” he says. “The machine—well, we’ll find out.”
Out on the runway, near the edge of taxiway DD, “the machine”—a
ceilometer— sits on a small patch of grass, burnt to brown by jet exhaust. It
measures cloud cover, but only directly above the airport. Even if the thick-
est fog bank were rolling in from the west, over Manhattan, the ceilometer
wouldn’t register it until it arrived. That’s where Sauer comes in. La Guardia
is one of 135 airports around the U.S. with a human weather observer, there
to back up a suite of instruments known as an Automated Surface Observing
System, or ASOS. Sauer watches the weather, and he watches these machines
that watch the weather. Once each hour—more often, in poor conditions—
he runs up to the roof, looks at the sky and then checks what he sees against
what the machines have registered. With a few keystrokes at an old terminal,
he changes the numbers. Rather than a single layer of scattered clouds at
8,000 ft., he sees three. “I did not accept the output from the automated sys-
tem because it was not completely accurate,” he says. “I backed up the sky.”La Guardia’s human eyes are more the exception than the rule—a fail-
safe for the airport’s 83,000 daily passengers. The sensors on the runway
are the headwaters of a rushing river of automatically collected data. The
observations they collect join tens of millions of others, from satellites and
radars, buoys and instrumented balloons, anemometers and thermometers
alongside highways and protruding from the fuselages of airliners. They
flow through a purpose-built telecommunications system and pool together
at designated centers on each continent, where they are processed intoWa r s
Weather