An historic day

2011-01-08 16:48:48.000 – Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist

Al and Marion Lake, and the Grilled Elvis

Today was a bit of an historic day on the mountain, for several reasons. For starters, this shift marks 5 years since I spent my first shift on the mountain as an intern. Focusing more on today, it’s Elvis Presley’s birthday (he would have been 76 today). That only comes around once a year, right? In honor of the King, long-time volunteer extraordinaire Al Lake made Grilled Elvis sandwiches, just like he has every time I have been on the mountain with him over the last 5 years. I will never forget the first time he presented me with this culinary creation, exactly five years ago today. I was working in the weather room on my intern project, and with no warning, Al came up with a plate and handed it to me. He informed me that a Grilled Elvis is a sandwich containing peanut butter, banana, honey, and bacon (the most important ingredient). All this is then grilled. I’m not going to lie, I was hesitant to try it, but I did, and my life would never be the same. But seriously, it actually is a very delicious, albeit unhealthy, sandwich.

The actual reason today was historic has to do with the installation of a brand new static pitot tube anemometer on our tower. This anemometer is our primary device for measuring wind speed, year round. At times, during certain conditions, we can and do use other instruments to measure wind speed, however no other device that we own is able to be left in the tower year round like the primary static pitot tube anemometer can be. As you’ve already heard several times in our observer comments lately, the pitot anemometer that was in the tower until Thursday, catastrophically failed a few weeks ago, and hasn’t been working completely right for quite a while. That, coupled with the fact that a brand new pitot hasn’t been put on the tower since 1997, makes this a very special day.

Plenty of pictures and video were taken through the process today, but we haven’t had a chance to sort through it all yet. I’m sure in the coming days we will post some of the pictures, both on here and on our page on Facebook, and in a couple weeks we will be making the next ObsCast and this will undoubtedly be the topic for that video.

Now that our new anemometer is on the tower, wired, and hooked up, we will wait to see how it performs tonight when we go back into the fog, and winds increase up to hurricane force by tomorrow.

Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist