Weather forecasting creates high pressure aboard warship

ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN THE PERSIAN GULF -- Weather weighed heavily on minds here, even as Mother Nature put on a spectacular show of lightning in the stormy skies overhead.

Watching the thunderbolts from the signal deck Monday night, Steve Jackson pointed out the collection of powerful ordnance, called the "bomb farm," 120 feet directly below.


		Grant M. Haller / P-I
	A system brings a sand-filled storm across the Persian Gulf and a wonderful display of lightning. It forced a weather warning on USS Abraham Lincoln.

"It makes you think," said Jackson, chief petty officer in the ship's meteorology department. Jackson said the carrier already took one lighting hit during a stopover in Australia. It hit the ship's mast.

"It made the hair stand up on the back of my arms," he said.

The department issued a T-1 thunderstorm warning Monday night, meaning lightning was striking within six miles of the carrier.

In normal conditions that might mean no refueling on the flight deck, no handling of bombs, except to move them below decks.

But, with Iraqi flight operations going on, the bombs remained where they are, topside, ready to load.

Conditions are not normal.

A P-I reporter and photographer were on the Lincoln during the Iraq war. Read their stories, see their photos.
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War's on, and weather's acting up. The front that has made ground troops' progress a sandy, dusty, blinding hell is sweeping southeast toward the gulf.

It's not a pretty picture.

"This is the largest-scale and most severe weather system we've seen," said Lt. Cdr. Marc Eckardt, the ship's meteorology and oceanography officer.

The storm is bringing with it a fine dust, like a talcum powder, as it moves in from the northwest, turning the sky brown. Meteorologists said the ship could be slammed with it by morning.

"The wind will pick it up and dump it all on us tomorrow (late Tuesday night Seattle time)," said Eckardt, a graduate of the Naval Academy who lives in the Bremerton area.

The dust gets into everything, say ship's crew, who've been through four of the storms.

During the last storm, the dust was found even in the lube oil in the main engines of the nuclear carrier. It covers the decks, requiring repeated fresh-water washings. It's a clay dust, and when wet, can turn into a kind of concrete, crew said.


		Grant M. Haller / P-I
	Forecast duty officer Wendy Flowers of Marysville and Lt. Cmdr. Marc Eckardt talk about a frontal system bringing a sandstorm across the Persian Gulf.

The dust storms present further challenges to the Lincoln's pilots, who have already been battling shifting winds, erratic gusts, haze and high-altitude icing that can coat wings and weigh down planes. The storm will mean reduced visibility and more turbulence.

In the tricky business of hooking up a jet traveling 150 mph to an arresting wire on a moving vessel, reduced visibility can be nerve-racking.

"The pilots can rise right above the dust when they take off. But when they come back, it's, 'Where's the boat?' " Eckardt says.

As of Monday evening, the ship's aircraft had been involved in more than 180 missions in 24 hours with fellow aviators from the USS Constellation and USS Kitty Hawk. Pilots covering ground troops advancing toward Baghdad reported seeing dust as high as 15,000 feet.

"Down below, you could see the dust build up so that you could barely see the ground," said Lt. John Patterson, a Whidbey Island-based pilot. "Walls of dark clouds were rolling in from the far west."

Those clouds can present problems for pilots without air-to-air radar capabilities as they search for airborne fueling tankers.

In the sky, running on fumes, fuel can mean life and death.

"The guys low on gas, they can't see the tankers for the clouds. And if they go high, they may run into icing," Eckardt said.

The meteorology department prepares daily weather briefs for the carrier's air squadrons and the small support ships surrounding the Lincoln, using satellite images, charts, radar data, Internet reports, readings on latitude, longitude and speed.

"There's not a whole lot of weather data coming out of Iraq, so we rely a lot on the satellite images," Jackson said.

Like all weathermen, the ship's forecasters take heat when an evening's prediction of rain precedes a bright, sunny day. That's business as usual.

"You have to be thick-skinned," said Eckardt. "We're wrong a lot of the time, but we're usually wrong about one thing. One thing out of 10. But everyone concentrates on that one thing."

In the war theater, with so much depending on a correct forecast, the pressure's more intense.

That's one reason Eckardt has made the rounds of commanders and aviators for two days, issuing storm warnings.

"I've been telling them this one's serious," he said. "The last thing you want to do is surprise them."

P-I reporter M.L. Lyke can be reached at abelincoln@seattlepi.com

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