Gaye LeBaron: Sonoma County forecaster was a walking weather app

I recently upgraded my weather app.

How's that for a sentence that would have been pure gibberish 20 years ago? Maybe 10, I don't keep track - although I'm sure there's an app for THAT.

The weather app doesn't keep us dry, but it does tell us, hour by hour, what to expect. And it's pretty good. Consistently close, but sometimes off the mark.

Weather and the prognostication of same has long been an imperfect art.

Where I grew up, in the tall timber of southern Humboldt County, there were two ways to predict rain - when the fog lies in the redwoods, or when there's a ring around the moon.

Times have certainly changed. In days past everybody got grumpy at the first dark cloud or introductory mist - particularly ladies with bouffant hair-dos.

I haven't heard a single soul complain about the rain this month, not even my dog Gus, who stands patiently to be blow-dried after his morning rounds of the backyard.

We not only are happy to take what comes, we have a pretty good idea of what's coming.

Geise ‘knew his stuff'

Who would have thought, in the not-so-far-off past, we could be promised in September that it would rain a lot in January - and have it happen?

For most of us, long-range forecasting meant a good guess about the following week. Except for a guy named Harry Geise.

Geise was way ahead of my weather app. In 1940, just out of high school, he was making long-range forecasts about gathering storms for a Chicago radio station. His success surprised experienced meteorologists. But he had to stop almost as soon as he started - because the government learned German U-boat captains were tapping into his forecasts, the better to sink ships.

After the war, he perfected his new science, despite doubts expressed by more prestigious meteorologists. He bounced from station to station until arriving in Sonoma County in the early '60s at the behest of KSRO's new program director, the venerable Merle Ross, who had worked with him at a Watsonville radio station.

Merle remembered when we talked last week that Geise not only made good money selling forecasts to businesses that depend on good weather but also offered a line of instruments for amateur forecasters. To sell his products, he had to sell himself.

Thus, he was a shameless self-promoter but, as Merle recalled. “He knew his stuff.” And he gathered a following, not only for his radio forecasts but also for the classes he taught at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State.

At one point, his meteorological magic took him from KSRO in Santa Rosa to CBS television in New York, a career leap that took everyone's breath away.

Now, if you read about him you will find that, while New Yorkers made fun of him at first, they became believers.

When I heard the recent warnings of the storm on the East Coast, of the government closing early and other precautions, I thought about Harry and his September 1966 warning on CBS that there would be a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day storm in New York City.

A chorus of meteorologists had a good laugh at silly Harry, who thought he could predict a major snowstorm, to the day, four months in advance.

Harry laughed last. On Dec. 24 and 25, 1966, 17 inches of snow fell on New York.

He was a character, no doubt about it. But critics who called his long-range (up to a year and a half in advance) forecasts lucky guesses would come to respect his abilities, if not his bravado.

Back in California in the '70s, Geise worked a network of radio stations plus KCRA-TV in Sacramento and was making good money telling contractors and others with the need to know, when to expect, rain, sleet or snow.

The systems he used - and taught - were the basis of today's TV weather forecasts. Harry did it without satellites and Doppler radar and information from outer space.

Geise died in 1995 at the age of 75. People had long before stopped snickering about his “good guesses.”

Redwood saviors

Back to present day: I read with great interest the story, earlier this month, about the 50 or so volunteers who are planting redwoods in the hills of the county's northwest corner in an effort to slow global warming.

Forest Unlimited, the Forestville nonprofit, has planted some 28,000 seedlings over the past two decades because redwood forests remove from the earth's atmosphere and contain the carbon dioxide that's a major contributor to rising temperatures. Two mature redwoods, the volunteers say, can remove 1,600 tons of carbon from the air, according to the Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative. That's about what each of us average Americans produce in a lifetime of greenhouse gases.

A subsequent story, in fact, tells us that Sonoma County's carbon footprint is second best in the Bay Area. Credit due.

As we knew, those same hills were once forested with old growth redwoods that, according to sailors who came close enough the shore to bear witness, reached to the edge of the continent and stretched back as far as the eye could see.

On weather, Doc got it wrong

The “Timber Rush” of the mid-1880s, which continued for nearly 100 years, stripped the hills of trees, many of them used to build San Francisco twice - once in the beginning and again after 1906.

No one had any idea at the time that the logging industry would have such a dramatic and dangerous impact on the climate. In fact, they believed the opposite.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when we had no idea what lay ahead. Or why. No better example to offer than the memories of Dr. William C. Shipley, one of the quintessential Sonoma County “old-timers.”

His meteorological assessment of the impact of coastal forests on our climate first appeared in the Healdsburg Tribune in 1938.

“We who live in Sonoma County today enjoy one of the finest and healthiest all year round climates in the whole world. We are blessed. Back in the good old days and up to the mid-(1880s) we had a much warmer climate in the summer. The thermometer in the long summer days would frequently stand by mid afternoon from 112 to 118 and on rare occasions 120 degrees, which made the corn grow tall and watermelons gigantic, juicy and sweet as sugar.

“As the great forests of the Coast Range were cut down and converted into lumber, fence rails and pickets, shingles and shakes, grape stakes and railroad ties, thus opening the door to winds and fog from the Pacific Coast, the summer climate has gradually become cooler so the tall corn and luscious watermelons of our boyhood are a things of the past for our locality.”

Born in Healdsburg in 1872, this melon-eating corn picker grew up to be a physician, practicing for a half-century and more, first in Cloverdale and then in Santa Rosa.

He began his practice in 1900 and was still seeing patients at his cluttered home office on Third Street (next to the Twin Dragons restaurant, the last vestige of Santa Rosa's Chinatown) when I was lucky enough to meet and interview him in the late 1950s.

Doctor by profession, historian by nature, he wrote down everything he remembered about growing up in the north county and shared it in the 1930s, writing weekly pieces for the Healdsburg Tribune. (These were later collected by the Sonoma County Historical Society and published in a book called “Tales of Sonoma County.”)

Shipley covered everything about Healdsburg and its history from his first Sunday school teacher to the Ku Klux Klan. But, according to what we know about the weather now, he had that wrong. Today's climatologists know for a fact, that cutting the timber has made our world warmer, not cooler. Another recent news story, from the New York Times, tells us that 2015 was the hottest year on record. If old Doc Shipley were telling it, he would say, “Maybe in New York, but not here.”

A global vision was not his long suit. But, then, he didn't have my weather app. No wonder he got it backward. So much for the ring around the moon.