Page 117 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

favored rainfall, since they saved money on the days it rained and they did not
shoot outside, so Krick provided them with “wetter” forecasts than normal. The
hydropower company Edison Electric, on the contrary, preferred dry forecasts
that favored water conservation in its dams, and Krick was glad to oblige by pre-
dicting clear skies for the company whenever he could. 41
Krick’s use of analog forecasting techniques almost led to disaster in World
War II, when, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force as one of six principal Allied
forecasters tasked with predicting the date of the D-day invasion of Europe, he
urged that the invasion proceed on June 5, when winds in the English Chan-
nel would have swamped the Allied invasion force. Ever the self-promoter,
Krick later tried to take credit for the actual June 6 forecast, but more-balanced
accounts indicate that the undertaking was truly a group effort, with Krick again
42
playing the role of a maverick. The Norwegian meteorologist Sverre Petters-
sen (1898–1974), who was centrally involved, later expressed his opinion of the
situation:

I knew Krick very well. In 1934 he had spent about two weeks with me in Bergen,
[Norway] and in 1935, [when I was] a visiting professor at California Institute of
Technology, I had worked with him for a period of four months. I considered him
a very able, intuitive forecaster who could rise to considerable heights if he would
dig deeper into the theoretical background of weather prediction. . . . However,
wisely or unwisely, Krick took a liking to industrial applications and offered his
services first to the film industry and later to any industry, anywhere. Krick’s main
protector at Caltech was its President, Dr. Robert A. Millikan, who had organized
U.S. weather efforts in the First World War. Millikan was a top level science advi-
sor and confidant of General [H. H.] Arnold, the Commanding General of the
U.S. Army Air Corps. . . . I knew that Krick, after a brief service in the U.S. Navy,
had transferred to the Army Air Corps and that his long-range forecasting system
had some kind of official sanction there. General Arnold saw to it that many of
the senior air weather officers were sent to Krick to study his techniques. . . . I had
little confidence in any system of mechanical selection of analogs and I thought it
. . . would not be difficult to look up the true meaning of the word “quackery” and
then ignore the forecasts altogether. 43

Krick returned to Caltech after the war, but, according to its former president
Lee A. DuBridge, “everybody around the campus, and other meteorologists
and other scientists around the country, said that Krick was a fake.” DuBridge
wanted Krick’s department to deemphasize long-range forecasting and proprie-
tary methods and to focus on “a real study of the physics of the atmosphere.” He

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