National Weather Service officials visited Newcastle Oct. 16 to present Arlene Cole with the Thomas Jefferson Award, the most prestigious award for the service’s volunteers.
The service presents the award to just five of its 11,000 cooperative weather observers every year. Cole also received a separate award for 45 years of service.
“It’s amazing that it’s been that long,” Cole, 82, said. “I don’t know where time goes.”
Cole started recording her weather observations in a diary in the late 1950s, when she lived on a farm in Jefferson. “On the farm, of course, weather is very important,” she said.
In the 1960s, when a local woman who had worked with the National Weather Service died, Cole assumed the role. In the late 1970s, she received her only formal training, a semester of meteorology at the University of Maine.
For more than 47 years, she has documented her daily observations of rain, wind, fog, hail and thunder, measured precipitation and recorded the temperature. She makes her measurements at 5 p.m. every day and reports to the weather service once a month.
“That’s quite a commitment to do that every day for 45-plus years,” said Hendricus Lulfos, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service center in Gray.
Cole always arranges for someone else to fill in when she has to leave town.
The service uses the data for any number of functions, including climate research and frequent requests from data from everyone from fisheries officials to insurance companies.
“The observations play a critical role in contributing to our knowledge and understanding of the local, national, and global climate,” according to a National Weather Service press release.
“The weather plays an important part in our lives,” Cole said.
The cooperative weather observers make a tremendous commitment to the service, Lulfos said. Many agree to record data for their region, only to resign, exhausted, after just a couple of years.
Volunteers with Cole’s steadfastness and longevity are “very rare,” Lulfos said.
The service is recognizing Cole, not only for her decades of service, but, with the Jefferson award, for the quality of that service, Lulfos said.
Cole is modest about her role, despite the praise. “I don’t do it for the awards,” she said. “It’s a habit. I just think of it, that’s all.”
“I am sorry that George couldn’t be here to see it,” she said. Her husband of 62 years, George Cole, died Sept. 19.
She questions herself only occasionally, usually in inclement weather.
“Sometimes, around 5 o’clock at night, when it’s snowing, I go out and I say, ‘What am I doing this for?'” she said.
It’s not enough to stop her, though. She said she hopes and plans to reach 50 years with the service before she quits.
(Arlene Cole provides weather data to The Lincoln County News. She also authors the “Newcastle History” column.)