2012.10.29 丹-拉瑟在电视上首次展示了飓风的雷达图像

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Dan Rather Showed the First Radar Image of a Hurricane on TV
By Megan Garber
OCTOBER 29, 2012
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... And he may have saved thousands of lives in the process.

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Hurricane Carla in September 1961, its eye visible on the Galveston WSR 57 radar. This was the first hurricane on radar to be broadcast on television. (via Dan Satterfield)
It was early September of 1961, and Hurricane Carla was making its way toward the Texas coast. Television stations, back then, didn't have the radar systems for storm forecasting so familiar to us today, which meant that the public at large didn't have a strong sense of a storm's path or strength until they were actually in it. So when Carla came raging toward Galveston Island, Texas, people were staying put -- despite evacuation orders from the U.S. Weather Bureau.

A young reporter, native to Texas but new to TV, had a hunch that the storm would be big. But he wasn't sure how to prove it. So the reporter turned to technology: He took a camera crew to the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) office in downtown Galveston, which featured a cutting-edge WSR-57 radar console. Seeing the size of the coming storm, he convinced the bureau staff to let him broadcast, live, from the office. And he asked a Weather Bureau meteorologist to draw him a rough outline of the Gulf of Mexico on a transparent sheet of plastic; during the broadcast, he held that drawing over the computer's black-and-white radar display to give his audience a sense both of Carla's size and of the location of the storm's eye. As CBS plugged into the broadcast, that audience suddenly became a national one.


With that, Dan Rather "literally changed the way the world sees hurricanes," a fellow Texas TV reporter put it earlier this year.

And that is not overstating the case. When Rather aired his broadcast, radar existed; maps existed; but radar superimposed on maps did not. Rather hacked himself a new way of reporting, right in front of people's eyes. His MacGyvered broadcast was the first ever display of a meteorological surveillance radar on television. And the on-the-ground reporting he would go on to do -- sloshing among the waves of the Galveston Seawall ("up to his ass," Walter Cronkite would notice, "in water moccasins") -- would go on to become the model for the swashbuckling storm reporting so familiar to us today.

More importantly, though, that broadcast would also lead to many, many saved lives. The spectral images of the hurricane Rather broadcast that day helped convince an estimated 350,000 people to evacuate their homes -- a move that at the time was considered the biggest weather-related evacuation in American history. And while Carla was more intense than the 1900 storm that killed an estimated 6,000 people in Galveston -- still the deadliest natural disaster on record in the U.S. -- only 46 people died at its hands. That is largely because of a reporter's hunch, a forecaster's expertise, a new technology, and a doodled-on piece of plastic.

Here's Rather recalling his coverage of Carla -- and the career advancement that would come with it:


Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic.


丹-拉瑟在电视上首次展示了飓风的雷达图像
作者：梅根-加伯
2012年10月29日

... 在这个过程中，他可能已经拯救了成千上万的生命。



1961年9月的卡拉飓风，在加尔维斯顿WSR57雷达上可以看到它的眼睛。这是第一个在电视上播放的雷达飓风。(通过Dan Satterfield)
那是1961年9月初，飓风卡拉正向德克萨斯海岸进发。当时的电视台还没有我们今天所熟悉的用于风暴预报的雷达系统，这意味着广大公众在真正身临其境之前对风暴的路径或强度没有强烈的感觉。因此，当卡拉向德克萨斯州的加尔维斯顿岛汹涌而来时，尽管美国气象局下达了疏散令，但人们还是留在原地。

一位年轻的记者，土生土长的德克萨斯人，但却是电视界的新手，他有一种预感，这场风暴会很大。但他不确定如何证明这一点。因此，该记者求助于技术：他带着摄制组来到位于加尔维斯顿市中心的美国气象局（现在的国家气象局）办公室，那里有一个尖端的WSR-57雷达控制台。看到即将到来的风暴的规模，他说服局里的工作人员让他在办公室里进行直播。他请气象局的一位气象学家在一张透明的塑料板上给他画了一个墨西哥湾的粗略轮廓；在广播期间，他把这幅画放在电脑的黑白雷达显示屏上，让观众感觉到卡拉的大小和风暴眼的位置。随着哥伦比亚广播公司的插播，这些观众突然变成了全国性的观众。


就这样，丹-拉瑟 "真正地改变了世界看待飓风的方式"，一位德克萨斯州的电视记者今年早些时候这样说。

而这并没有夸大其词。当拉瑟播出他的广播时，雷达是存在的；地图是存在的；但雷达叠加在地图上却不是。拉瑟在人们的眼前为自己开辟了一种新的报道方式。他的MacGyvered广播是有史以来第一次在电视上展示气象监测雷达。而他后来所做的现场报道--在加尔维斯顿海堤的波浪中游走（"直到他的屁股，"沃尔特-克朗凯特注意到，"穿着水靴"）--将成为我们今天如此熟悉的风暴报道的模式。

但更重要的是，这次广播也将导致许多人的生命得到挽救。拉瑟当天播出的飓风图像帮助说服了大约35万人撤离他们的家园--此举在当时被认为是美国历史上最大的与天气有关的疏散行动。虽然卡拉比1900年的风暴更加强烈，该风暴在加尔维斯顿造成约6000人死亡--仍然是美国有记录以来最致命的自然灾害--但只有46人死于其手。这主要是因为一个记者的预感、一个预报员的专业知识、一项新技术和一块涂鸦的塑料。

以下是拉瑟回忆他对卡拉的报道--以及随之而来的职业发展。


梅根-加伯是《大西洋月刊》的一名工作人员。