An army of meteorologists at these Games are responsible for bringing weather forecasts to nervous venue managers. In the first days of the Olympics, they had almost nothing but bad news: drenching rains and temperatures in the mid-50s in some places and sudden blizzards and fog in the mountains.
"I've never been on a chairlift with an umbrella before," said Canadian silver-medal winning moguls skier Jennifer Heil.
In recent days, a cold front made everyone forget these early troubles. But spring-like conditions are coming back. From Wednesday, the forecast calls for warm, rainy days with temperatures downtown back in the 50s, about nine degrees higher than average.
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Associated Press
Fans from the U.S. cheer during the third run of the men's singles luge competition.
And there's snow in the forecast, but not where's it wanted or needed. On Cypress Mountain, the white stuff started to fall Tuesday, but a spokesman for the Vancouver Organizing Committee said the dusting would hurt more than help the remaining events.
Even on the clearest day, ski cross is a sport that makes its best athletes look accident-prone. Canadian Julia Murray said that from her limited vantage point, there were "quite a few" spills Tuesday. She also said the jumps at the top were harder to get started on because of the snow.
The temperate spell could once again put the squeeze on the 27 meteorologists at work here.
At all hours of the night, calls from worried venue managers come in to the command center. At each of the five venues, three meteorologists, working in shifts, produce forecasts hourly. These meteorologists are wielding high-tech gear that can "see" the wind in 3-D and simulate weather conditions at one-kilometer intervals.
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Phred Dvorak/The Wall Street Journal
Trevor Smith, lead meteorologist at Environment Canada's Olympics command center.
An international team of researchers is here testing new methods of forecasting dubbed "nowcasting" that can give pinpoint weather predictions that take effect right away. "It's high pressure," says lead forecaster Trevor Smith.
On Feb. 12, the first day of the Games, the Olympic forecasters gave Whistler's downhill skiing organizers some bad news: Course groomers typically inject water into the snow so it will freeze, but forecasters said the temperatures at the bottom of the track wouldn't be cold enough to do that—at least not until later in the weekend. At 3 a.m. that Saturday they called the weather center, and ski officials later postponed the race until the following Monday.
When that day arrived, forecasters were fixated on "Harvey's cloud," a dense foggy patch that tends to appear mid-mountain on Whistler, right in the middle of the downhill course. At the command center, George Isaac, a Canadian scientist who's part of the Vancouver nowcasting team, pointed at the nascent patch, which appeared as a blotch on the computer screen in front of him. "We were worried that this would come down," he said.
On Sunday morning, Feb. 14, monitors stationed at Whistler Mountain north of Vancouver saw another worrisome blotch on their radar and called central command to get the time of impact. The nowcasters answered that the blizzard would hit Whistler right in the middle of the biathlon competition.
What they didn't realize was that the half-hour storm would blind all the top biathlon athletes, throwing them out of contention, says Roy Rasmussen, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who generated the prediction.
"To be truthful, we didn't know it was going to impact the competition," says Mr. Rasmussen.
—Adam Thompson contributed to this article
Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com and Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
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