Camanche weather watcher gets national award
Kay Luna
CAMANCHE, Iowa — James Blaess pulls on his Iowa Hawkeyes jacket and heads outside, watching light snow fall into a cylinder in his back yard.
A small puddle of water is forming slowly at the bottom, making him smile.
Pulling out a measuring stick, the Camanche man shows how he'll measure the precipitation — whatever he manages to catch in the gauge — when the snow stops. He then will record the data on a daily log sheet for the National Weather Service, just like he's done every day since September 1979.
"This kind is the hardest to measure," he says, pointing to the dusty snow. "It melts as it falls."
Blaess will figure out a way. He always does with what Bill Elliott of the National Weather Service in the Quad-Cities describes as "an accuracy rate of 99 percent over the past 25 years."
Before he got the job, Blaess' father and mother, both now deceased, also had worked as volunteer weather observers since June 1958.
"My family's done it for 46-plus years," he said. "We're more or less like history-takers."
Blaess, a contracted post office maintenance worker, said he does not like a lot of attention and never expected anything in exchange for his quiet volunteerism.
So, he was surprised and honored during a private ceremony at his home recently when he became one of 25 official weather observers in the nation to receive the weather service's John Campanius Holm Award for outstanding service.
Blaess was chosen from a pool of about 11,000 volunteer observers who monitor and record weather data every day.
Elliott, who manages the weather observers program for the Quad-City region, said Blaess goes above and beyond those minimum requirements each day.
For instance, Blaess doesn't just write down how much rain falls. He writes down when it starts and stops, if he's awake and observing at the time.
This week, he noted when the snow started and stopped, along with how much fell into his precipitation gauge and onto square "snow boards," which he lays in his yard to collect the snow for measuring purposes.
Blaess said he doesn't chase big storms, like official weather spotters do in the county. Instead, he uses basic equipment supplied by the National Weather Service to keep track of what happens in his Camanche neighborhood.
He said his weather-tracking station still is called Clinton #1, which his parents ran from their former home all those years.
"I actually want to share the award with my parents," he said. "They're the ones who set the standard for me and had the dedication to do it."
Blaess said he hopes to keep doing the job for another 25 years and maybe hand off the weather observer's baton to his grown daughter, Bambi.
"Someone has to do it," he said. "I don't mind it."
Kay Luna can be contacted at
(563) 243-5039 or kluna@qctimes.com.