Web site lets experts, travelers track weather

RENO, Nev. -- Scientists use the Western Regional Climate Center to study the complex patterns of air pollution, droughts and global warming. Richard Potter dials in to dodge mosquitoes.

While engineers tap the Web site's research to help build bridges in high winds, Potter is downloading data to try to avoid the bugs and rain on a fall canoe trip in Montana.

The climate center at the Desert Research Institute on the edge of the Sierra specializes in the West but maintains 30 years of records for nearly all the 20,000 weather reporting stations in the country -- valuable to experts and tourists alike.

Construction contractors who miss deadlines use the information to help document lost work time, Hollywood film companies set shooting schedules and vintners scrutinize the weather tables to help make decisions at vineyards in Napa Valley.

Potter found his information surfing the Internet as he mapped plans to retrace the footsteps of Lewis and Clark down 110 miles of the Upper Missouri River in September.

"We're especially concerned about insects," he said from Chicago. "You can survive with them but putting on all that glop and having to wear headscreens takes a little of the pleasure out of the wilderness trip."

That's why he shouted "eureka" when he found the climate center's information on fall freeze dates likely to kill off most the bugs at Fort Benton, Mont.

Potter is among a growing number of individuals responsible for the more than 1 million Web hits a month at the site the center started about 10 years ago.

"The use has gone up roughly 25 percent a year for the past four years," said Richard Reinhardt, director of the climate center founded in 1986 at the Desert Research Institute, part of Nevada's university system. "We have another 700 to 800 contacts a month on the telephone or through e-mail."

Users include lawyers, detectives and insurance companies trying to establish weather conditions at a crime scene or traffic accident.

Fees, which generate about $75,000 a year, are charged for some of the client-based work, but most of the information is free to the public.

"Five or six years ago, we had a big request for data from Yuma, Arizona, because they were trying to bring in a minor league baseball team," said Jim Ashby, the center's climatologist. "They wanted to prove that the weather was not too brutal to sit out at baseball games there."

Outdoor weddings and company picnics are also the sources of queries.

"People want to know what the weather is going to be like on a particular weekend," Ashby said.

"We tell them what we have are the statistical averages. We can tell you that on one day it rained five times over the past 30 years and on the following date it never has rained," he said.

"But we're careful and warn them it is just averages. It's kind of a statistical crapshoot but at least they have the information."

Potter and his wife, Jill, typically alternate vacations between international cities and outdoor trips -- often sea-kayaking adventures to places like Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, the coast of Maine or the Outer Hebrides Islands off the coast of Scotland.

Potter figures there's an 80 percent chance the insects will be gone before their trip, based on a graph entitled "Probability of Fall Minimum Temperature Occurring Earlier Than Given Date."

Another shows that in the third and fourth week of September there's "a nice plateau" of daytime highs in an otherwise trend of plummeting readings beginning in August.

"What's so great is they have captured so much information and have such a long historical database -- because it's not the average that kills you, it's the extremes.