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First stop was the Weather Bureau in Washington, where Rossby got an unofficial job. The bureau was already an elderly outfit (founded in 1870) and valiantly impervious to new ideas, especially when presented by a young Swedish missionary so full of bounce that he could hardly stay on the floor. Rossby left the bureau hurriedly in 1927 after making an unauthorized weather forecast (a good one) for Lindbergh's Mexico flight.
Disgrace did not last long. The year 1927 was a yeasty period; the public was crazy about aviation. Almost at once the Swede rejected by the Weather Bureau was picked up by the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics and sent to California to establish the first airway weather reporting system.
Western Air Express (now Western Airlines), a pioneer airline, was flying radio-less Fokkers made of cloth and plywood between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Weather procedure before take-off was to call the next stop on the telephone and ask how the weather looked ahead. Often a field that had looked fine was socked in when the flight arrived or unexpectedly bad weather was encountered en route. "They had not considered," explains Rossby, "that weather may come from sideways."
With his assistant, an air-minded University of California student named Horace Robert Byers, Rossby combed the airline's territory for "people who had a telephone and who stayed put all day." When one of these treasures (a gas-station owner, waterworks superintendent or hotel manager) was found, they tried to persuade him to report visibility, ceiling, and rain or snow every 90 minutes. Sometimes Rossby would borrow a pilot and airplane from the Army Air Corps and buzz a remote small town. When all the inhabitants were craning their necks at the glamorous flying machine, he would land in the flattest field, parade into town in an air fan's car and confer with the mayor. The result of this showmanship was usually a group of weather reporters.
Swedish Compliments. These days were wonderful fun, and Rossby's weather system worked. It became the model for use by fast-spreading U.S. airlines. When not too busy, Rossby kept up with the hard-boiled pilots in jazz-age drinking and other festivities. Most of them envied his way with women. "It was his Swedish manners," says one of his friends of those days. "He'd hold the hand of a nightclub hat-check girl for several minutes, ladling out those Swedish compliments. If it was any other guy, the girl would have called the manager."
In 1928 Rossby was invited by Massachusetts Institute of Technology to head its department of meteorology. He left Byers in charge of the weather-reporting system and said goodbye to California and its convivial pilots. "A problem solved," Rossby often remarks, "is a dead problem." In Cambridge fresh problems were waiting for him.