In a 1997 case, Mogil was hired by a court-appointed defense attorney whose client was arrested and charged with buying drugs. "In that part of the country, you would not design a roof for 30 pounds of snow per square foot." "The drifts weighed 33 to 41 pounds per square foot on the day of the collapse," he concluded. After adding in wind speeds and directions, and the slope of the roof, Wistar concluded that the roof was supporting drifts as high as 2 to 2 1/2 feet. Records indicated that such a snow burden occurs three times a century in that area. Calculating melting rates, Wistar figured that what was left on the warehouse roof weighed 10 to 14 pounds per square foot. Weather records showed that three storms piled up more than 23 inches of snow. His job was to figure out whether the building should have been expected to hold up under the snow. When a warehouse in Waldorf collapsed under the weight of repeated snowstorms in January 1996, AccuWeather forensic meteorologist Stephen Wistar was hired by the building's insurer. The weather investigators collect reports from official and unofficial sources, data archives and witnesses, and assemble them into a logical, informed description of what happened. "Somebody slips on a sidewalk, and the issue becomes, 'What were the weather conditions then, and what were preceding conditions?' " Disputes arise over construction delays and auto accidents. "A lot of our cases are civil cases," said Sobel. That kind of case is memorable but is the exception. She was playing around with the gun, holding it next to her head."Īfter it went off and the bullet ripped through her ear, she tried to blame it on her husband, who was out of town. After figuring in the local weather on that night and the lack of moonlight, he said, "I was saying there was not enough light in that bedroom, that if she woke up and looked, she probably could not tell who it was. "The main thing was to prove the lighting conditions in that bedroom," he said. Meyer helped on a case in Virginia a few years ago in which a woman claimed that her estranged husband had crept into her bedroom and shot her. It depends on how many people are suing other people." "I may have two or three cases going at once," said Meyer, 71, a former research meteorologist retired from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. They provide information, write reports and provide expert testimony in court. Sobel said AccuWeather has 95 full-time meteorologists, six working in forensics.īut demand from lawyers is providing significant cash for smaller companies, solo practitioners and retired meteorologists. Weather forensics is a relatively small enterprise for big-time national companies such as AccuWeather. "As our society grows more complex, weather is a bigger factor in accidents, agriculture and corporate decisions." "I would guess it has to do with the increasingly complex legal aspects of our society," he said. The number is growing slowly, said AMS Executive Director Ronald McPherson. The American Meteorological Society has 106 members - three in Maryland - who list forensic work among their specialties. Mogil is a former National Weather Service meteorologist who does weather education and forensic work. "I'm sure the lawyers are very busy looking for meteorology experts to talk about the weather conditions." Michael Mogil of Weatherworks in Rockville. "Just looking at those storms, it was not the type of thing you'd fly in and land in," said H. After an American Airlines plane crashed June 1 at a storm-raked airport in Little Rock, Ark., forensic meteorologists across the country were buzzing about what they saw when they went to their computers and called up that night's radar and satellite data for Little Rock.
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