Down the memory hole?
author: not usually a reposter
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I noticed that this article no longer exists and I couldn't find a reason for it's retraction. If anyone knows if this proved to be untrue or otherwise problematic please post about it.
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Palm Bay man has eye for detail
Meteorologist's work featured in national weather magazine
By Billy Cox
FLORIDA TODAY
Jun 3, 5:52 PM
 http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/peoplestoryA1172A.htm
On May 25, while scanning the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite
Program images pipelined into his desktop from 450 miles in orbit, Hank
Brandli skidded at a nighttime photo of Iraq. It looked familiar. But
not exactly.
Brandli retrieved another DMSP image he'd archived from May 3. He
compared the two. The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of
light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the
Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3.
"It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields," says the retired Air Force
colonel from his home in Palm Bay. "Maybe I'm full of s---. Maybe all
they're doing is building a highway to put in McDonald's and sell
hamburgers. But why go that way? I think we're in bed with Kuwait. I
think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war."
That's an audacious observation. Especially considering those
labyrinthine lines of exasperated motorists waiting to gas up at the
fuel pumps in Baghdad. Not to mention the fact that Iraq's
infrastructure officially won't be capable of exporting oil for another
week or so.
But as the May-June issue of Weatherwise magazine makes clear, Brandli
isn't a conspiracy zealot squinting for guppies in the fig trees. An
article titled "Weathering History" profiles the Vietnam veteran as a
pioneer in satellite meteorology who was unable to discuss much of his
defense work until 1995. That's the year President Clinton declassified
vaults of Cold War satellite images.
Now 63, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus isn't allowing
multiple sclerosis to derail his passion for eye-in-the-sky technology.
Three times a day, he checks his the latest unclassified downloads from
American and Russian weather satellites filtering into his home-wired
receivers. He found last month's DMSP nocturnal shots over Baghdad
especially compelling.
"You look for patterns. Patterns tell you things," says Brandli, who has
masters degrees in meteorology, aeronautics and astronautics, and the
author of "Satellite Meteorology" for the Air Force's Air Weather
Service in 1976. "With night photos, you can distinguish natural gas
burnoff, which looks globular, from city lights. And suddenly, over just
a few weeks, we've got this straight line of lights leading all the way
to those beautiful wells in southeastern Iraq.
"If you're building pipelines, you've got to have power, you've got to
have light -- trucks and personnel and food and all sorts of support. If
I had to bet, I'd say it looks like we're running Iraqi oil through
Kuwait. It would make sense, because Kuwait's got its infrastructure
intact."
At the State Department in Washington, D.C., David Staples on the Future
of Iraqi Projects desk says he doesn't know if Iraq's oil is flowing
into Kuwait. He referred the query to the Defense Department. A DoD
spokesman suggested contacting the Office of Coalition of Provisional
Authority (OCPA) in Baghdad. OCPA was not immediately available for
comment.
In Indialantic, retired Air Force Col. Hyko Gayikian isn't sure what to
make of Brandli's speculation. He wonders if maybe Kuwait's lights were
pre-existing features that were temporarily shut down during the war.
(Brandli says no, that he checked other photos prior to the March war
campaign and could find no such lights.)
Either way, Gayikian has nothing but praise for Brandli's abilities. He
was Brandli's commander at the Southeast Asia Tactical Forecast Center's
intelligence compound in South Vietnam beginning in 1966. "Hank is one
of the most knowledgeable people in satellite meteorology I've ever
known," Gayikian says. "He's a real pro, and he's stuck with it. He'll
always call to tell me about unusual satellite pictures he's just gotten
his hands on."
As the Weatherwise article makes clear, Brandli's judgment was a valued
Pentagon asset during the Vietnam era. But the clandestine nature of his
work often thrust him into thorny dilemmas, none more profound than the
Apollo 11 splashdown in 1969.
Four days before America's first moon walkers were scheduled to return
to Earth, weather photos from classified DMSP spy technology -- far more
advanced than NASA's resources -- indicated the astronauts' designated
Pacific landing zone would be under siege from "screaming eagles."
Screaming eagles are thunderheads peaking out at 50,000 feet; full
blown, they could produce winds capable of shredding the Apollo
capsule's parachutes and killing the crew.
Under strict orders to share his photos with no one without "Special
Access" badges, Brandli, then a meteorologist at Hickam Air Force Base
in Hawaii, felt there was no time to work through the tedious chain of
bureaucracy. So he briefed Fleet Weather Central commander Capt. Sam
Houston in a parking lot, took him into the vault and showed him the
screaming eagle photos.
Unable to present the data as evidence, Houston nonetheless persuaded
NASA to reconfigure a new landing zone and the Navy to reposition its
recovery vessel, the USS Hornet, to safer waters. Houston never revealed
where he got his information. Apollo 11 landed safely; sure enough, the
original impact area became an untenable soup of dangerous wind and
waves.
"That's part of what makes Hank so good at what he does, his ability to
win people over," says Frank Iverson, an Air Force colleague in Hawaii
who now lives in Castle Rock, Colo. "He has this wonderful, contagious
enthusiasm for his work. He always gets up for the big game. It's like
the Super Bowl for him."
Perhaps Brandli's Weatherwise tale, which discusses everything from
cloud seeding in Vietnam to the recovery of "Corona" spy film ejected in
tiny rocket canisters from satellites, will open up a new chapter in
military history. "It's amazing to me," he says, "how many guys who've
come up to me over the years and said, 'We read all these books on
Vietnam, but nobody mentions the weather.' That's because it's been
hushed up for so long. But with military operations, weather
intelligence is always your first priority."
By no accident, then, does Brandli view the world, including politics,
through satellite meteorology. One of his favorite photos is a DMSP
nighttime view of North Korea. Wedged against the glittering
metropolitan constellations of China, South Korea and Japan, the
totalitarian state of Kim Jong Il is little more than a year-zero black
hole.
"It's amazing to think about going to war with a country that's so
bloody poor," Brandli says. "It's empty, it's vacant. They've got
nothing. Not even electricity."
Brandli even views the 9/11 terrorist attacks through the lens of
weather.
"They spent months, maybe years, planning this thing," he says. "But it
had to come down to a last-second call, because there was a hurricane
coming up the coast and a cold front moving out.
"Think about it: September is the worst month in the world to be
planning anything in the air on the East Coast, because you're at the
height of hurricane season. In fact, climatologically speaking, Sept. 3
is the worst day of the entire year to plan a flight. And yet, you had
this day where the weather was perfect, from Maine all the way down to
Washington. You can't plan that far out and hope you get lucky.
"What I'm saying is, I think they had a weather guy on their team to
help set it up."
Originally at:
http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/peoplestoryA1172A.htm
Found here:
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/chucara2000/message/24665
and partially here:
http://mailman.io.com/pipermail/perfectunion-l/2003-July/000729.html
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