Change in the Weather

I’ve been learning a lot about weather—specifically, precipitation—for a story I’m writing. I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past 10 months researching precipitation for this novel or novella or long short story, I’m not sure which. Specifically, I’ve been interested in a weather phenomenon that occurred in my hometown of La Porte, Indiana from sometime in the 1930s until about 1967 or 68, called by meteorologists and climatologists the “La Porte Anomaly.” It was an anomaly because sometimes it would rain or hail only in La Porte, not in any of the nearby areas, or it would rain longer and harder in La Porte than anywhere else around. Scientists eventually studied the anomaly starting in the mid-1960s. They and the laypeople affected by the phenomenon came up with various explanations. I’ll leave some of those theories for readers of my eventual story. But by the 1980s it became clear that only one explanation made sense.

Here is some of what I know.

I’ve learned how we measure rainfall with U.S. Weather Service rain gages, about how most towns have only one when I thought they’d have half a dozen sprinkled around town and the stretches of land in the city limits that aren’t built up yet. I thought that because of weird days I’ve experienced where it’s perfectly dry in my neighborhood but there’s a downpour four blocks over. I thought someone official would want to know about that little miracle, but they don’t.

I’ve learned how dependent the Weather Service has been on volunteers to record precipitation and take note of other weather phenomena, and the degree of diligence that work requires.

I’ve learned that where I come from, near the bottom of Lake Michigan’s spoon, snowfall is a “Lake Effect” phenomenon. Rain isn’t.

So what caused the sheets of rain that kept me inside as a child in the early 1960s, the unusual thunderstorms that shook the house in wee morning hours, the manifestations of the La Porte anomaly? Human beings. Airborne particulates from the pollution in and around Chicago, especially from the steel mills, mixed with droplets in the clouds and caused aerosolization. Sure, maybe it sprinkled in South Bend that day, but in my home town thirty miles closer to Chicago, we’d have cats and dogs for an afternoon because the pollution, wind, and warm temperatures created, well, a perfect storm, right over my town and nowhere else, for about thirty-five years.

Emission controls went in to cars starting in 1968. Stricter pollution controls went into factories starting in about 1970 with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Maybe the winds changed, too. In any event, the precipitation bubble over La Porte faded and moved away, making a less dramatic scene somewhere over Lake Michigan. And pollution, though it has abated to some degree, is still with us. Some believe a mild anomaly has now set up shop over Valparaiso, Indiana.

Was it a message from God? La Porte has had its rascals and criminals, but we weren’t Sodom or Gomorrah. The only evil person I knew as a child was a boy named Conan, who once pounded the fender of my dad’s car with a wooden mallet, just for fun, and who put a kid in handcuffs and flushed the key down the toilet. Golf ball-sized hail should have fallen regularly on Conan, but it didn’t.

That’s because weather is impersonal. The wind doesn’t blow in order to mess up your hair. The snow doesn’t fall to make you discouraged about having to shovel. Rain lacks a motive to soak you when you forget an umbrella on quick trip downtown to return a sweater. We moan about it as if it were a nagging mother-in-law. But bad weather doesn’t dislike you. It just IS.

Yes, we humans made that extra rain in La Porte happen, just like we’re now changing our climate on a global scale. The weather isn’t mad at us, punishing us for legalizing gay marriage and marijuana and no-fault divorce. It has simply shrugged its shoulders and said, “Okay, you guys made that haze that’s floating up into the atmosphere, so here comes the rain and hail, hotter heat and colder cold, and more violent hurricanes.” No judgment, no vindictiveness. Just science.