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In the Eye of the Storm
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20150 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
2,367 Words |
| Author
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Linda Joyce Forristal
Linda Joyce Forristal, Life editor for The World & I, is a
member of Les Dames d'Escoffier and is on the board of the
Weston A. Price Foundation. |
The eastern deciduous forest reaches its peak near Asheville, North Carolina, which lies in a high valley of the Great Smoky Mountains. The trees are greener and the crickets seem to chirp louder through the night. Here, the natives say, the four seasons come and go gently. Winters are mild and so are the summers. Springs with their mountain flowers and falls with their leaves changing colors are spectacular. With the weather so perfect, it only seems right that this is the site of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). In one sense, it almost seems too perfect. What government agency wouldn't want to be outside the snarl of Washington, D.C., besides being separated by five hundred miles from superiors!
However, Kenneth Hadeen, NCDC director since May 1984, denies any political maneuverings in the settlement of NCDC in Asheville. "Basically, it was serendipity. It turned out that there was movement within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NCDC's parent organization, to consolidate several smaller weather records centers into one. At the same time, it just happened that this building was vacated by another agency after World War II. So the government had this building and it was just about the right size. I'd like to say it was great planning, but I think it was just a matter of circumstance," says Hadeen.
And what a building. The Grove Arcade Building, originally designed as a shopping mall and now on the Register of National Historic Places, was conceived, planned, and started by Edwin Wiley Grove, who is often referred to as the father of modern Asheville. The architecture is in the neo-Gothic style, built with terra-cotta, granite, and Verde antique marble on the exterior, while the interior is finished with travertine. The building was so sturdily built that initially Model-Ts were driven up a ramp at the north end of the building to drop shoppers off in front of the individual shops located on the third floor. There was parking and occasional dances on the roof.
Today the scene has shifted. The former shops now house offices and sophisticated computers, which conduct the main mission of NCDC--the management and dissemination of global environmental data.
A major question today is whether or not the global climate is changing and what, if any, is man's role and responsibility in that possible change. With that in mind, it is important that a baseline of long-term climate data be compiled, quality-controlled, archived, and made available to scientists for interpretation.
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