Old Missoula

First-Order Weather Station Opens In 1935; Earlier Readings at U

Missoula’s weather station was established as a first-order station on the sixth floor of the Montana Building, opening for business on the morning of Nov. 1, 1935.

Previously, weather observation had been taken at Ft. Missoula and the University.

Bernie P. Hughes was placed in charge. Up to Feb. 1, 1936, all fire weather forecasting for Region 1 of the Forest Service was done from the Spokane station, but on that date Ralph T. Hanna was transferred from Spokane to do this work. The Missoula station gave local forecasts and district fire weather forecasts.

Feb. 1, 1936, the Forest Service fire weather service was transferred to the Weather Bureau which is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture.

Service Expanded

By 1939 Missoula’s United States Weather Bureau station was offering such services to the community as complete daily, local and regional forecasts, including weather summaries, weather maps, and readings of temperature, wind, moisture, sky conditions and barometric pressure.

Special forecasts known as “warnings” were issued either in connection with the regular daily forecasts or at other times when injurious or hazardous weather conditions were expected. Such were the storm warnings, cold-wave warnings, stock warnings, and frost warnings, of particular interest to fruit growers.

The bureau also supplied a ski forecast covering the possibilities of snow, sunshine and other conditions during the winter sports season.

Compilation of data was made possible by the extensive network of leased wires carrying coded readings by teletype from each Civil Aeronautics Authority airport station. Hourly observations were made at each of these points.

In Earlier Years

Dr. Morton J. Elrod, who became the head of a second order weather station at the University in 1898, found that the average annual rainfall for Missoula over a period of more than 50 years is 15.48 inches.

The year 1931 was one of the driest years on record, according to Dr. Elrod’s reports. The precipitation that year was only 8.49 inches. Elrod found that the next driest years were 1929 and 1924, each with 10.78 inches.

For 1928 he recorded a minimum temperature of 27 degrees below zero. Although it was said that Missoula’s coldest day occurred some time in the dim past, when the thermometer dropped to 42 degrees below zero. That was supposedly the minimum of some 52 years of records.

The largest number of clear days for the period from 1916 to 1931 was 244 in 1919. This was close to 67 per cent; including the 43 partly cloudy days the sun shone on 79 per cent of the days. The smallest number was 107 in 1920, less than one-third of the time. But in this there were 143 partly cloudy, the largest number, so that there was sunshine part or all of the day for 217 of the 365 days of the year.

Dr. Elrod stressed the fact that there was no sunshine recording instrument in Missoula.