Post open for someone who’s interested in the weather
“Hot enough for you?” “Cold enough for you? How cold was it, really?” “How much rain was that?”
For the past 18 years, John Beltz has been the man in Jefferson providing semi-official answers to those questions, serving as a volunteer weather observer for the National Weather Service. Every morning he provided high and low temperature, rain or snowfall, and snow depth for the previous 24 hours. His data went into a vast store of data maintained by the NWS.
Beltz retired from his volunteer post March 17, relinquishing his National Weather Service equipment. “I decided during the winter I just didn’t want to do another winter,” he said. “That was getting to be too much.”
The NWS provides volunteer observers with an outdoor sensor that’s wired to an indoor monitor and a rain gauge. The temperature readings are easy to gather, and so is a 24-hour rainfall. Snow is more work. “You have melt it see how much precipitation there actually was, and then you have to get to a bare surface again so you can start measuring snow for the next 24 hours. Eighteen winters of that was enough,” Beltz said.
Eighteen years is a long run, but not the longest in Iowa by a long shot. Brad Fillbach, hydro-meteorological technician at the NWS’s Des Moines weather forecast office said the observer in Hubbard has done it for 55 years.
Fillbach said anyone can be a volunteer weather observer, and as of Thursday, he wasn’t sure who the next observer would be in Jefferson. “You need to be committed to doing it, and you need to love the weather,” he said. The NWS provides all the equipment and does any needed maintenance on it.
He said, though, that Beltz was not just any observer. “We’re going to miss him. He was one of the best observers we had in our area of responsibility. We always knew we’d get a report and that it would be right,” Fillbach said.
Beltz, like Vern Foje before him and longtime observer Howard Porter before him, delivered a hard copy of his observations to the newspaper, and in the past two years to GreeneCountyNewsOnline, every Friday morning. That service isn’t required by the NWS. Beltz also provided a monthly summary.
Beltz held onto decades of records that predated his service. In 2013, when a May snowfall raised questions about stories “old-timers” told of Memorial Day snow in Jefferson, Beltz was the go-to person for information. Last spring, when the Bell Tower Festival steering committee was considering whether or not to purchase rain insurance, Beltz provided 10 years of data about rainfall on the second weekend of June.
That sort of “service” is much appreciated, but beyond the expectations of Fillbach and the National Weather Service.
Anyone who would like information about being a volunteer weather observer can visit the NWS website or call Fillbach at 1-800-759-9276.
