Tim Vasquez's webpage


I grew up in California, Texas, Arizona, and in Germany. For a number of years I wanted to work for the airlines flying commercial jets, but my uncorrected eyesight was not ideal and I quickly found that weather forecasting was my calling. I got my first job in 1984 composing the daily weather page for a Dallas area newspaper. It paid peanuts, but it got me some experience and disciplined me into analyzing the weather consistently and taking accountability for my work. I continued this job while I was in college and also dived headfirst into storm chasing, with 1987 my first big season on the Plains. Unfortunately 1987 and 1988 are widely agreed upon to be the worst years in chaser history, but it's probably for the better as I diverted my severe weather interests to journals, conference preprints, and frequent visits with NWS forecasters.

A couple of years later I went into the Air Force as a meteorologist, and this marked a major turning point in my life. I was honor graduate in their weather training program and was selected to work for the F-117A program at a remote site in Nevada. At the time, the Stealth Fighter was still a classified project. After three years I left Nevada in 1992 and was assigned to Dyess AFB, Texas. As a forecaster, my briefings and forecasts were used mostly by the B-1B Lancer force at Dyess AFB and by UN Command in Korea. I did get to participate in some high-profile operations like the Operation Support Hope humanitarian mission into Rwanda, the 1994 English Channel D-Day anniversary B-1B flyover, and Space Shuttle mission STS-59's ferry flight back to Kennedy through Dyess.

In the late 1990s the tech boom was underway and I left the Air Force to run my weather consulting and programming business. I developed mainstream and custom meteorology packages, wrote meteorology books, ran seasonal storm chase forecasting services, trained forecasters, and have authored a Weatherwise department for over 15 years and IFR Magazine for about 5 years. My areas of interest include meteorology, geography, earth sciences, astronomy, general philosophy, 20th century history, and Cold War and Vietnam War studies.

METEOROLOGY
 
Selected meteorological studies
  • Continental Flight 128 meteorological analysis [PDF, 1.1 MB] is an investigative report on turbulence that affected a Houston-bound flight on August 3, 2009.
  • Yemenia Flight 626 meteorological analysis is an overview of weather conditions that affected Yemenia Flight 626 on June 30, 2009.
  • Air France Flight 447 meteorological analysis sheds some light on what might have happened out in the Atlantic on June 1, 2009.
  • QIWI—A Web-Based Flash Flood Monitoring Tool Gourley, J.J., Ami Arthur, Jian Zhang, Robert Maddox, Ken Howard, and Tim Vasquez. Preprints Thirtieth International Conf. on Radar Meteor., Munich, Germany, Amer. Meteor. Soc., 17–19. QIWI was a demonstrator Java application I developed and coded in 2001 for NSSL/WISH which blended topography maps with quantitative flood warning data.
  • Palestine, Texas Tornadoes of December 29, 2006 - Damage survey. At the time I was living in Palestine, and I decided to scope out where the damage occurred.
  • Weather satellite image of May 10, 1996 Everest disaster (1.4 MB GIF) -- spanning 0200 to 1300 UTC (see Google). This is the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster chronicled in Into Thin Air.

  • PROJECTS, ESSAYS, AND TRIVIA
     
    Photographs
  • AFGWC AWN Weather Switch: Tinker AFB, Fall 1997 - just a few random pics
  • AFKN Korea weather (1995-96)
  • Chanute weather school (1989)
  • My Boeing 747-200 flight training (1997)
  • Weather forecasting at Mombasa, Kenya (1994)
  • Weselberg, Germany where I lived in the mid-1970s
  • Abby's pictures (dog)

    Vacations
  • JUNE 2001: Road trip from Dallas to California and Oregon
  • MAY 1999: Road trip from Dallas to Alaska
  • JULY 1999: Visit to Ajo, Arizona

    Funny stuff
  • IBM Virtual Universe Operating System, a super-old mainframe programming parody found on Usenet (joke)
  • Whoozit -- and the Cthulhu mythos (joke)
  • SACISMS: Humor from the *old* Air Force days
  • Funny, and not so funny aviation accidents
  • Weird confluences (GPS stuff, 2002)
  • When Nigerian spammers compete, you win!
  • Technical description of why thunderstorms appear over haunted houses

    Odds and ends
  • Bizarre 1970s METAR remarks
  • Russian airfields database - one of my old Cold War projects from 2006
  • United States antipodes
  • GPS map of DFW overflight (1999)
  • Our ratings of Norman, Oklahoma contractors (old, pre-2003)
  • Composite map of all the places I've flown to
  • Excellent books and reviews!
  • Culturegraph project
  • FEN Philippines production music from the early 1980s
  • Davey Dogwood topographic park map

    Last but not least . . .
  • Weather Graphics -- my business site.

  • CONTACTING ME
      Use the contact form to send an e-mail.