🧵 Introducing a new series, NOAAstalgia: Picturing Our Past. Every other week, The NOAA Heritage Program will be sharing photos from NOAA's history.
In this week's photo, a young woman launches a pilot weather balloon.
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These balloons get around the world and get blown up and down and every which way. With gear and ice they may not look like balloons. Pilots under stress are likely to identifiy them as unknowns with no radar signature.
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Women's first professional opportunities in meteorology occurred as a result of World War II. Women joined the Weather Bureau (predecessor to today’s NWS) as observers & forecasters to fill job vacancies. By 1945, more than 900 women were in the Bureau. Many offices made up almost entirely of women.
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Nice!
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There's a photo somewhere of my mother launching a balloon. Raleigh City Museum had it, and I think they kept it. Not only was my mother a weather observer, she also met my father, who had become the same in the Navy, when they exchanged daily reports by phone between Greensboro and Winston-Salem.
