By LEON M. SILER
Co»d» punched »ith weolhcr dole ond itored in (Ms tunnel of cobincts number in the hundreds
of millions. Thot's Rulus Moynor. cord librorion, exomining
о
lew. — (NWRC photo)
Storehouse of a
Billion Answers
Uncle Sam fields a world of <|ues-
lions at this .Vslickvillc center, and lie's
seldom stumped.
1 1 would be highly appropriate to
mount a giant-sized question mark
atop the sprawling Asheville structure
once known as the Arcade Building
and now as the Asheville Federal
Building. The structure is headquar¬
ters for a question-and-answer business
conducted by our Uncle Sam on a scale
unmatched anywhere in the world.
"Environmental" questions are the
ones that pour in there. Available to
answer them arc staffs numbering 600
people, several computers, huge col¬
lections of data on punched cards or
rolls of microfilm and magnetic tape,
and numberless millions of sheets of
typed, printed, duplicated or handwrit¬
ten information.
The sheets of handwritten informa¬
tion alone are filed away on ten miles
— that’s right, ten miles — of shelving.
An "environmental" question obvi¬
ously is one that relates to man’s en¬
vironment; to the land, the air. the
water about us. These, basically, arc
the things dealt with by the Asheville
question and answer people, who work
for the Environmental Data Service, or
EDS. of the Environmental Science
Services Administration, or ESSA, of
the United States Department of Com¬
merce.
The EDS is broken down organiza¬
tionally into more branches and units
and sections than there is room here to
enumerate.
Pick a Question
Pick a question at random out of
a day’s EDS mail, delivered from
the nearby Asheville postoffice. and
chances are it asks, in effect, some¬
thing about weather records or else
something about the questioner’s
whereabouts.
If it concerns weather data, or clima¬
tology. it will be answered by the Na¬
tional Weather Records Center, larg¬
est of the EDS agencies. If it concerns
somebody’s whereabouts, the reply will
come from the National Geophysical
Data Center, a smaller but still sizeable
EDS subsidiary.
A third possibility is that the ran¬
dom question asks something about
earthquakes. If so. it goes to the Scis-
mological Data Branch, which collects,
files, and makes available to the scien¬
tific public worldwide earthquake rec¬
ords in the form of seismograms.
Customers of the EDS want to know
practically everything, at one time or
another, about turns the weather has
taken in days gone by. A measure of
credit is due Thomas Jefferson for the
fact that the NWRC of the present is
equipped to accurately inform these
customers.
Climate Records
Jefferson was a sort of daddy of
climate records for this country; he was
sure they would prove of great value,
and they did. Today, the EDS notes,
these records are in daily demand by
people engaged in such activities as
agriculture, housing, marketing, ship¬
ping. aviation, air conditioning, flood
control, manufacturing — and going
on vacations.
If the EDS waited for individual in¬
quiries from all these sources, it would
be swamped. It anticipates many of
them with publications dealing with
climatology, of which it distributes 1,-
300.000 copies to subscribers each
year. But the individual inquiries still
come in great numbers. Answers to
some of them arc free; to others,
charged for.
In addition to answering a great
many questions and issuing a lot of
publications, the NWRC performs
many special services requiring the use
of weather data and skills. Some are
for the military; many others are for
private enterprise, with the customers
charged enough to meet expenses.
Overall, the NWRC modestly de¬
scribes itself as "a public storehouse
of climatological information and
know-how . . . eager to serve anyone
who needs climatological services."
A chart prepared by the EDS lists
more than half a hundred business, in¬
dustry and professional groups, from
aerospace engineers to zoologists, to
whom weather records arc of oc¬
casional or continual importance in
their day-to-day affairs.
Without the weather records avail¬
able at Asheville, investigators of air
pollution problems throughout the
United States frequently would find
themselves at a loss as to how to pro¬
ceed. No designer of a new jet air¬
plane would reach any decisions with¬
out consulting the NWRC as to weather
a
THE STATE. AUOUIT 15. 1969
