Meteorologist Helping Preserve Weather Data

By Lisa Suhay

Mark Seiderman ’83 is the Indiana Jones of meteorology, traveling to exotic locations to retrieve and preserve crumbling parchments containing observations used in today’s sophisticated weather model forecasting and global warming research.

“Knowing how the surface wind blew, or seeing barometric pressure readings from a lightship in the 1700s, actually plays an important role in storm modeling during hurricane season and in other critical weather research,” Seiderman said from his office in Fletcher, N.C.

An employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the past 16 years, specifically with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, he is part of the Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP) with the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service.

You won’t see him standing in front of a green screen, clad in a suit and tie wielding a pointer. “No, I’m not that guy,” he said with a laugh. “I’m the fly to Vietnam, Africa or the Dominican Republic and retrieve crumbling ship’s logs and Colonial diaries and journals guy.”

Often, they are races against time.

Seiderman goes in armed with a laptop and digital camera on a tripod. In the humidity of the tropics, he and his colleagues gently place the fragile documents onto wooden boards and painstakingly photograph, catalog and add them to a database of 45 million images publicly available on www.ncdc.noaa.gov (type CDMP into the search field).

“These documents are literally falling apart in your hands. About 10 percent of the 45 million have come from me, and they range from the 1890s to 1999. We are getting back into the 1700s now,” Seiderman said. “The images are available not just to meteorologists and governments, but to anyone who is interested in them.”

In fact, the data being preserved are vital to climatologists, environmental scientists, researchers and others who forecast and predict weather patterns and storms and conduct environmental impact studies all over the world.

Looking back on his time at Old Dominion, Seiderman, who earned his degree in geophysical sciences and meteorological studies, now wishes he’d taken a few more courses on Colonial history. His favorite course was Synoptic Meteorology (the analysis and prediction of large-scale weather systems, such as extratropical cyclones and their associated fronts and jet streams), taught by since retired professor and local NBC weatherman Jim Smith.

Seiderman began his career in 1986 at Dulles International Airport, taking upper air measurements. He has also worked with the World Meteorological Organization, which funded the Vietnam data recovery field trips.