The .01 Solution…

Among other things, I’m a bit of a weather nerd. I’ve always been fascinated by it and became even more interested during my time as a hot air balloon pilot. I was considered the go-to guy for pilot weather briefings for our local balloon rallies and have collected several books on weather. For a long time, my favorite channel on cable was — you guessed it — The Weather Channel. My wife and kids often tell me I should have been a professional meteorologist.

Others are afflicted by the weather bug as well. I once read an article by legendary New Mexico author Tony Hillerman who said his book editors occasionally chided him about spending too much time describing clouds and weather conditions in his mystery novels set on the Navajo nation.

You can usually tell if someone has lived in New Mexico for a long time if they talk frequently about the weather, describe the clouds, the color of the sky and stand outside in the rain during the monsoon season to enjoy the rarity of the event.

So I always look at the weather chart in the Albuquerque Journal to see what locations might have received precipitation around the state and what conditions were present there.

In the last few months, I started noticing something in the report that didn’t seem right. The chart showed the northern New Mexico village of Chama receiving .01 of an inch of rain daily. The daily amount never seemed to deviate unless there was a real storm system in that part of the state, in which case the amount of precipitation would be reported as what were likely normal precipitation accumulations.

From my days on the New Mexico news desk of United Press International, I knew that state weather data came from the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque. We had a special weather teletype in our office that would print out regional “zone” forecasts, weather reports and forecast discussions that we would then forward to newspapers and radio stations that were our clients.

So with my still burning journalistic curiosity, I decided to call the NWS office in Albuquerque and see if they could explain why Chama was getting .01 of an inch of rain daily for past several months.

“Oh no,” the friendly meteorologist on the other end of the phone said when I asked about the repetitive Chama report. “We hadn’t notice that. I’m glad you brought it to my attention.”

I questioned him a little more and he said there are actually two weather reporting reporting stations in Chama and at least one of them is automated. He said he suspects that unit is on the fritz and was trapped in a cycle of reporting a smidgen of precipitation daily.

I recall that a station in Clovis had a similar problem several years ago. Only in that case, the reporting station said the city was receiving about a quarter of an inch of rain every day. That problem was eventually corrected.

So fear not, residents of Chama, Your town is not being sprinkled by one-hundredth of an inch of rain or snow every day. By my calculations, that would be an extra 3.65 inches of rain per year, which by New Mexico standards, is a lot. However, having been in Chama during a summer monsoon downpour, I suspect that much rain could fall in a single event.