A Christmas wish--more data!!

Well, it's been another crazy weather year in 2008 here on planet Earth. As we look back on the year, I want to thank all of you for participating in the unique community we've built here at Weather Underground to help document, understand, mourn, and celebrate the ways weather impacts our lives. Special thanks go to all of you who helped out those affected by this year's destructive hurricanes. As we look ahead towards 2009, I'm sure you're wondering what's on my Christmas wish list for the coming year. Hmmm, let's see--let's start with money to fund improved hurricane intensity forecasts, a new QuikSCAT satellite...and more data!

More data, more data,
Right now and not later.
Our storms are distressing,
Our problems are pressing.
We can brook no delay
For theorists to play.
Let us repair
To the principle sublime:
Measure everything, everywhere,
All the time.

For data are solid,
Though dull and though stolid;
Consider their aptness,
Their matter-of-factness.
Theory is confusion,
A snare and delusion,
A dastardly dare,
A culpable crime.
Measure everything, everywhere,
All the time.

No need to be weary
Of the mysteries of theory.
We only must look
At the data we took.
Immediately inspired,
Grasp the answers required.
What are so rare,
As reason and rhyme?
Measure everything, everywhere,
All the time.

More data, more data,
From pole to equator;
We'll gain our salvation
Through mass mensuration.
Thence flows our might,
Our sweetness, our light.
Our spirits full fair, our souls sublime:
Measure everything, everywhere,
All the time.

It shall come to pass, even in our days,
That ignorance shall vanish and doubt disappear.
Then shall men survey with tranquil gaze
The ordered elements shorn of all fear.

Thus to omniscience shall we climb,
Measuring everything, everywhere, all the time.


Poem credit: A. Fleisher. Originally published in 1957 in the Proc. Sixth Weather Radar Conf., American Meteorology Society, Boston, MA, P. 59. Slightly modified by Peter Black, NOAA's Hurricane Research Division.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Jeff Masters