Weather in the Courtroom

Book excerpt: While serving as director of NOAA s National Climactic Data Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bill Haggard noticed an explosion in the number of requests from attorneys needing weather data for their cases. The Center offered blue ribbon and gold sealed data certified by the Department of Commerce that could be submitted as evidence in a court of law, but government meteorologists could not be released from their full time duties to interpret this data in the courtroom. Into this void stepped pioneering forensic meteorologists, as well as Bill Haggard himself, who retired from the government for a second career as an expert witness. For a society enthralled by litigation and severe meteorological events, Weather in the Courtroom analyzes multiple diverse high-profile litigations in which weather was a significant factor. Were the disappearance of Alaskan Congressman Nick Begich s plane on October 16, 1972, the collapse of Tampa Bay s Skyway Bridge on May 9, 1980, and the crash of Delta Flight 191 in Dallas/Fort Worth on August 2, 1985, natural or human-caused disasters? Haggard s recounting of these litigations, in which he served as expert witness, show us just how critical interpretation of weather and climate data is to our understanding of what happened, and who, if anyone, is at fault. "