The potential consequences are as sweeping as our technological dependence. Only later did we realize that those technologies are vulnerable to the effects of weather in outer space. Then came a series of scientific revolutions that made certain technologies, from electricity to telecommunications, central to our lives. In fact, until the nineteenth century, it had almost no appreciable effect whatsoever on human activity. It doesn’t make you hot or cold, doesn’t flood your basement or take the roof off your home. That’s because, unlike everyday weather, you can’t experience space weather directly. By contrast, most people have no idea that there is weather in outer space, let alone what its fluctuations might mean for our planet. Regular, Earth-based weather is such a fundamental part of our lives that we are almost always aware of it and very often obsessed with it it is the subject of everything from idle chitchat to impassioned political debate. The remaining ones are employed by the only similar institution in the country: the Space Weather Operations Center, run by the Department of Defense on Offutt Air Force Base, in Sarpy County, Nebraska. ![]() Eleven other forecasters work there as well. Ever since leaving the Air Force, Tegnell has worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, in Boulder, Colorado: ten hours a day, forty hours a week, three decades spent staring at real-time images of the sun. His official title, one shared by no more than a few dozen Americans, is space-weather forecaster. Today, his job is simultaneously so obscure that most people have never heard of it and so important that virtually every sector of the economy depends on it. That is still how Tegnell makes a living, although he hung up his wings in 1996. Whether working or playing, he spent his days there looking at the sun. He served two tours there, twelve hours from anything that could be called a city-a godforsaken place, as Tegnell recalls it, but gorgeous, with beautiful beaches, terrific fishing, and almost no rainfall year-round. The military taught him to use telescopes and radio arrays, then sent him to the Learmonth Solar Observatory, at the northwestern tip of Australia, to gather data about the sun. Interested in things that happen in the sky and unmoved by the hippie culture around him, Tegnell joined the Air Force, in 1974. While taking an astronomy course there, he attended a lecture by a not yet famous scientist named Carl Sagan. ![]() But eventually Tegnell returned to the Bay Area-this time to attend Berkeley, which, by the late nineteen-sixties, was another island of odd people. When Tegnell’s father returned from Korea, the family moved away, and then moved often. “We were an odd group of people,” Tegnell jokes, “and that’s why I’m strange the way I am.” The view was spectacular, almost none of the non-incarcerated residents locked their doors, and almost all of them knew one another and shared the camaraderie of an unusual identity. Yet even given the proximity to the likes of Whitey Bulger, it was a peaceful place to live. The whole of Alcatraz Island is less than a tenth of a square mile, so, despite all the security measures and “ DO NOT ENTER” signs, the inmates and civilians were never very far apart. That included Tegnell, who lived with his mother and grandfather, a guard, while his father was stationed in Korea. At the time-this was in the nineteen-fifties-there was, in addition to the federal penitentiary, a preschool, a post office, and housing for prison employees and their family members. ![]() Ken Tegnell’s first home was on Alcatraz.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |