James Gleick is an assistant metropolitan editor of The Times. CLOUDS PASS OVER the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colo., in shapes that you can never see from places like New York. It is hard at first for an Easterner to believe. So clear is the sky, so empty of soot and moisture, that even on a stormy day, when the air seems to shimmer and tremble with a humid electricity, the clouds' texture stands out from 30 miles away. They stream across the mountains, in anvils and puffs and billows, filtering the light and reflecting it, until the weather of the whole county starts to seem like a spectacle being staged for somebody's entertainment. Sometimes the weather almost seems to make sense. Alexander E. MacDonald, director of the Government's most ambitious project in very short-term weather forecasting, can watch all of this from his office at the Environmental Research Laboratory in Boulder. He has a theory about it. "Meteorologists raised in the East think of weather as looming up, a kind of statistical thing," he says. You don't know what's going to happen until it does. The ones from the West, they think of the weather as deterministic. Because they look out and here's this big storm cloud a hundred miles away. They say, 'Oh, thunderstorm tonight!' and they see it grow over a period of eight hours, and they think they were right. This is a place for being fooled into thinking that weather has got more sense than it really does. To the proposition that the weather makes sense - that it must make sense - more scientists and more industries are committing more time and money than ever before. The weather game has become a high-stakes affair. Predictions are getting better - truly. Companies are learning to rely on them, even when they shouldn't. In Boulder, in Washington, in a handful of key civilian and military centers here and abroad, the problem of forecasting has taken over the most powerful computers in existence. In this country, weather is a national obsession. Newspapers generally carry voluminous reports, though most of the information is many hours out of date by the time it is read. Weather dominates television news in a way that is hard for Europeans to conceive. A half-billion or so calls are made each year to recorded weather announcements. And in case this isn't enough, nearly 3 million people each week watch the round-the-clock Weather Channel on cable television for an average of a half-hour a day. Even the Weather Channel doesn't know why, but many of those people sit and watch for hours on end. Yet the other proposition - the proposition that weather looms up out of nowhere, obeying nature's laws but defying human comprehension - is as secure as ever. The same scientists who know their forecasts are better than ever before also know that the next big snowfall could be a complete surprise. Nonscientists know it just as well. And still, a Federal judge in Boston ruled last month that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was liable for the deaths of three fishermen who drowned in an unexpected storm 150 miles off the Atlantic coast. There is triumph and frustration in the weather business these days, so much triumph and so much frustration that it's sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. O LOOK A FEW more days, a few more hours, sometimes just a few more minutes into the future, the American meteorological community is undertaking a series of ambitious new programs. Alexander MacDonald's project in Boulder, the Program for Regional Observing and Forecasting Services, is one, designing, in effect, the forecasting station of the 21st century. Another, the National Storm Program, is being prepared by a number of government agencies - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. It is a plan to conduct nationwide research into the kind of vicious medium-size weather systems that produce virtually all life-threatening thunderstorms and tornadoes. The impetus for all this, the piece of faith that makes it seem plausible, is the rapid evolution of global computer forecasts. To a professional meteorologist, thinking back to the standard of just a few years ago, the computer forecasts coming out of Washington's National Meteorological Center, the global forecasting center of the National Weather Service, and out of a European center based in Reading, England, are a technological marvel. Improbable as it seems to people betrayed again and again by daily local predictions, the global forecasts have now gained an accuracy at five and six days into the future that matches the two-day forecasts of a decade ago. To the dismay of Washington's leading meteorologists - and to the increasing delight of industry and agriculture in Europe - the Europeans have taken a firm lead. The state of the art is the European Center in Reading, where the best meteorologists of 17 member nations produce daily predictions for 3 to 10 days into the future. The predictions cover the entire globe - they must, because the weather in London and Rome depends on the weather just a few days earlier in Las Vegas and Buenos Aires. Although the United States is not a member, the center sends a boiled-down version of its forecast to Washington over a high- speed wire every day as a matter of international courtesy. Washington is as far as the European forecast gets in the United States - local weather services have no access to it, because Washington distributes its own product. But at least the European report serves as a daily reminder of what the National Meteorological Center has set as a goal for itself. "They have really set a new standard," says William D. Bonner, the center's director. We are very much in the business of trying to regain what we thought was the pre- eminent position. For that matter, it's not only the European Center. There are now a couple dozen centers - the Japanese are doing very well, the Canadians have got a Cray computer and very talented researchers, there's the U.K. Meteorological Office. They are changing the whole business. This transoceanic battle of crystal balls is being played out with an awareness that the stakes are higher than ever. Improved forecasts would save vast sums of money - how vast depends on which study you read. But as an example: in just one state, New York, storms, spring floods and a hot dry summer cost residents an estimated $3.2 billion in 1983. Gas and electric companies need to anticipate consumer demand. Construction companies need to know when to pour concrete. Farmers need to time harvests, and truckers need to plan the fastest and safest routes. Most major financial institutions now find it expedient to employ staff meteorologists. HE BLIZZARD that buried the Northeast Corridor two years ago on Feb. 11 and 12 was the worst since 1947. Two feet of snow fell, with drifts rising higher than small trees. For a while, New York City, its streets and parks smothered in white, was all stillness - to the particular dismay of thousands of motorists trapped in place on the highways overnight. When the snow started falling Friday afternoon, the Weather Service had still been forecasting only 6 inches. The major airports of the Northeast shut down, along with everything else. In Washington, when Dulles International reopened, an unsurprised Lennart Bengtsson was on one of the first planes to arrive. Bengtsson, a Swedish meteorologist who is director of the European Center, was paying a visit to his counterparts at the National Meteorological Center. "That storm was well predicted," he says - and better predicted by the Europeans. And indeed, the computer printout of the European forecast from as early as the Wednesday before shows a two-foot weekend snowstorm (although even that forecast had the storm beginning and ending later than it actually did). Washington's forecast wasn't that much further off the mark, though, from the point of view of meteorologists thinking in global terms. And that's one reason global terms haven't much helped people relying on local forecasts. The scale is too big and the models too coarse for people who want to know whether tonight's game will be rained out, or even whether tomorrow's storm will cause flooding. The computer has to begin with the data fed to it, and in the many miles that stretch between observations taken by balloons or satellites, ground stations or fishing boats, there is plenty of room for the atmosphere to develop interesting small features - interesting especially to the people who get caught in them. On Wednesday morning, let's say, the computer predicts that a snowstorm will form in the Atlantic the next day, more or less out of nowhere, and roll up the East Coast until it passes 100 miles southeast of New York. When Thursday comes, if that storm materializes as promised, the meteorologist feels he has done something marvelous. The prediction would have been almost impossible a decade ago. And if the storm track is 50 miles southeast of the city instead of 100, who is going to quibble? "But say you got a guy driving along the L.I.E.," said Harlan Saylor, a veteran forecaster who paid his dues in New York in the 1940's and 50's and who now serves as a chief of operations at the National Meteorological Center. The radio tells him there might be 4 inches of snow and instead he gets 16. What's he consider that? He considers that a hell of a lousy forecast. Now any forecaster who said there'd be 4 or more inches of snow in a 12-hour period, he's hit it, but as far as the guy in the street is concerned, it's a bust. Scale is just one problem. Communication is another. As information is handed down the line from supercomputer to user, it has plenty of opportunities to be abridged or garbled. Washington's forecasts go out twice daily to every local weather office, to aviation forecasters, to private weather services, to interested foreign governments and to anyone else willing to pay the cost of transmission over a telephone line. But to turn the output of the big computer models into detailed local forecasts, individual weather offices still must rely heavily on a kind of informed guesswork. And by the time television stations digest those into a form suitable for broadcast, much information has been lost. What may have begun in Washington as a vivid picture of a pivoting cold front on a summer afternoon may have ended up as the week's fourth consecutive forecast of "scattered showers." That doesn't say much, and even if it did, it has no great value unless people are willing to act on its message. Meteorologists realize that their business inspires cynicism in what they call "the user community." THE NOTION OF A European forecasting center first emerged in the flush of cooperative Common Market feeling among the nations of Western Europe in the 1960's. Years were spent on planning the facility and figuring the potential economic benefit. Britain provided a building, one of those cleanly modern international-style structures decorated by gifts from various member nations, and by 1976 the center was off and running. From the start, its scientists did everything right; in particular, they kept a firm eye on the connection between weather and money. The center's forecasts go out daily to each of the national weather services of the 17 member nations, to use as they see fit. These services adapt them for the public, but many of them also serve business users, in a way that is out of the question in the United States. Some weather services act like private consultants, charging fees for weather information tailored to the needs of companies that can afford to pay. In the United States, of course, the Weather Service must make its forecasts available to the whole public. It cannot favor business users. So, many companies, including many television broadcasters, deal instead with private forecasters. Not so in Europe - government agencies like the United Kingdom Meteorological Office are happy to serve industry directly. North Sea oil rigs, for example, rely heavily on special forecasts. A typical platform has riser pipes from the wells under the sea, and a forecast of heavy waves means that all the pipes must be disconnected. "It takes 12 hours to disconnect and three days to reconnect," said J. Austin Woods, scientific officer of the European Center's directorate. During that time they would have taken $:1 million of oil or more out of those pipes. So they are very happy indeed to pay for forecast information for their precise location, and the U.K. Meteorological Office are very keen to give them good service. Within meteorological circles, there is a noticeable sense that industry is easier to serve than the general public. People tend to hope for more precise information than the weather services can give - will it rain in my backyard between 2 and 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon. And while businesses, calculating profit and loss over the long term, know how to use information that comes in the form of a statement of probability, individuals often do not. Even so, for people as much as for businesses, money is an issue. "You do have these rather vague areas, hard to assess, in the way people live," Bengtsson said. Take Sweden. It is common there that people have weekend cottages, and they must plan where they would like to be. They would be prepared to pay quite a lot to avoid a ruined weekend. He imagines that this is true elsewhere, as well. THE HISTORY OF modern forecasting and modern computing have been intermingled ever since John Von Neumann designed his first machines at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, in the 1950's. Von Neumann recognized that weather modeling was an ideal problem, because the behavior of the atmosphere depended on complex but well-defined equations of fluid motion. True, it's no small trick to work out equations that will do justice to the evaporation of moisture from fields and ponds or the turbulent flow of wind over mountains, but, in theory at least, with perfect data and fast enough computers, scientists hoped to predict the motion of the atmosphere as definitively as astronomers predict the motion of planets. It hasn't turned out that way, of course. One catch is that there's no such thing as perfect data. Weather observations worldwide are more plentiful than ever, mainly because of satellites. Most wide-body aircraft now carry devices that automatically report wind speeds over the oceans, and there are networks of ships and buoys supplementing weather stations on land. But vast blank areas remain, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean, with the result that forecasts are less accurate below the Equator than above and less accurate on the West Coast of the United States than on the East Coast. There are occasionally geopolitical blank spots, too - at the moment, no weather data come in from Iran and Iraq. The other catch is that the atmosphere is so fiendishly unstable, so chaotic, that small errors grow with discouraging rapidity. Mathematicians now believe that computer simulations will never produce accurate day- by-day forecasts beyond a limit of two weeks or so into the future. But within that range, computers have made great progress, and the European Center began its life with the fastest machine it could get, the Cray 1. The forecasters in Washington finally topped the Cray 1 last year with a supercomputer of their own, a Control Data Cyber 205, and the Europeans have moved on to the most advanced Cray, the X-MP. Teams at both centers are working on new models to take full advantage of the more powerful machines, and both teams hope to have the models on line by spring. The scientists in Washington point out that the models are similar - forecasts from Reading and Washington tend to resemble each other more than either one resembles the real weather. But it already seems clear that the Europeans will stay ahead in the coming round of improvements. The computer models are really little universes, their air, water, mountains, coastlines and - most important - their natural laws distilled into an essence that can be manipulated electronically. The substance of the model is the substance of the real world, more or less intact, but translated into mathematical equations. The model contains equations that behave very much like wind. It must contain equations that act something like clouds, although this has proved difficult. When humidity passes 100 percent, the model must know enough to rain and to add heat from the resulting condensation. And the model must do all of this for the entire globe, even when that requires rough averages and approximations. As sophisticated as a model can be, there is a sense in which it is less a solution to a problem than an imitation of the problem. The only way to guess the future is to set the model running in the computer and see what happens, the weather jerking along in 20-minute increments, each day passing in something like a half hour of computer time. "This is still a piece of art, in a way," said Lennart Bengtsson of the European Center, "because we can never get down to the smallest scales where the physical processes are taking place." Every advance in computer speed allows finer calculations. Instead of viewing the world as a grid of points 120 miles apart at seven levels of the atmosphere, the model can focus in to 50 miles and 16 vertical levels. As the mesh is tightened, less should slip through. With precipitation, especially, finer resolution is important. In the models, rain falls in large areas, in a nice, average sort of way. In the real world, unfortunately, rain comes in sharp local doses. FOR PINPOINT FOREcasts, especially of storms, the next great improvement will not come from the global computer models in Reading or in Washington. Most storms are too small and too short-lived. Local idiosyncrasies are too influential. Unfortunately, it is when the weather changes fast, in hours rather than days, that it becomes most interesting. And the more one looks at the disastrous floods and blizzards of our time, the more one realizes that lives are lost in the missed forecasts of the very final minutes before disaster. That is the reason for the very short-range forecasting program known as Profs (the inevitable acronym for Program for Regional Observing and Forecasting Services) and headed by Alexander MacDonald in Boulder. It has a narrow mission: trying to improve forecasts from zero to 12 hours. MacDonald believes that advanced forecasting stations like the one he has created can be put in place nationwide over the next decade, improving everything from flash-flood alerts to airport warnings. "The consensus is that there is tremendous value in accurate short-term forecasts of the kind we now think we can deliver," MacDonald said. The technology is already there, clear from the observations, to the forecasts, to the delivery. The Profs program has made real forecasts for the Colorado area (but not for publication) and has compared them to the forecasts produced at the same time by the National Weather Service in Denver. The program has done significantly better. The reason is that the experimental center gets many kinds of weather observations from new technologies not routinely available elsewhere. It receives visible satellite images and infrared satellite images, updated every five minutes. A whole range of radar pictures of cloud cover and storms shows up on its monitors. There are wind speeds from a tightly spaced network of ground stations and from a new Doppler radar. Every 20 minutes, there are temperature and moisture figures at different altitudes from a remote device called a profiler (ordinarily that kind of data comes only from weather balloons launched at 12-hour intervals). "Our purpose is to take all these exciting possibilities in science and bring them forward so the public can take advantage of them," MacDonald said. If you make a forecast in words people can understand - 'You're going to get real big hail, golf-ball size, an hour from now' - people will be able to use that. You have your new Porsche sitting there and you're going to say, 'Hey, Joe, can I use your garage for a few minutes? I got to change this spark plug. So Joe rolls his Volkswagen out and you roll your Porsche in. It started raining outside, a fairly standard light midday shower, and when MacDonald and I walked into his central computer room he pointed out the current forecast from Denver, the kind meteorologists love to hate: 20 percent chance of precipitation. The heart of Profs is a high-technology extravaganza: processors, disk-storage cabinets and color displays with keyboards. The global forecast centers use computers to process weather data mathematically, but MacDonald's computers do more. They organize the data and display it in color-coded, easily comprehended pictures. MacDonald sat at a terminal and pushed a few buttons, producing a map of the Colorado area and a crisp satellite picture of cloud patterns made one afternoon the summer before. He pointed to a squall line: "See this little line? It looks like almost nothing, but it's the key to the weather that's going to take place during the next couple of hours. Towns and lakes were visible on the display, beginning to vanish under the moisture flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico. With the push of another button, a color radar overlay appeared: blue for relatively clear air, green for light rain, yellow and red for the hail that signals trouble-making storms. MacDonald put the display in motion, zooming in on an area of thunderstorms. An overlay showed automatic wind reports every five minutes from ground stations. Another showed a cross section of the cloud cover at 30,000 feet, jet plane altitude, and still another showed a tiny cross for every lightning bolt in the area within the last five minutes. It is a picture of the weather that is more precise, more up to date and potentially more useful than anything now available to real-life forecasters. Now let's say you're the tower guy at J.F.K. and you're right here. MacDonald said. You got something that's really going to threaten lives. It's going to be a big wall of blowing stuff, it's going to appear out of nowhere, it's going to be gusts of 35 knots, and I know, right now, that it's going to hit you. BOULDER IS PERHAPS America's most important haven for meteorologists, home not only of the Government's Environmental Research Laboratory but also of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, known, of course, by its abbreviation, which is universally pronounced N-car . It is a well-financed and well-loved center, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and linked to a consortium of universities. It has a wide range of research programs, hundreds of resident and visiting scientists, its own airplanes, not one but two Cray supercomputers, and a magnificent I. M. Pei- designed headquarters on a hilltop in the lee of the wall- like mesas that rise on Boulder's western flank. It is also the place where much of the planning is under way for the new National Storm Program, the big research effort focusing on the middle-sized storms and storm complexes that produce the most damaging weather. With all the weather buffs in the neighborhood, people naturally develop an intimate appreciation of the details of certain local events. Some meteorologists, for example, can talk for hours about the Big Thompson flood. It began shortly after 8 o'clock in the evening of July 31, 1976, in the Big Thompson Canyon, a recreation area at the front door of Rocky Mountain National Park north of Denver. It ended 15 minutes later. In that time the flood killed 139 people. The wall of water stripped bark from trees 15 feet above the ground, leveled homes and campgrounds, tossed boulders and cars like driftwood. Ten inches of rain had fallen in the space of a few hours, and no warning of a flash flood had been issued. The weather radar for the Denver office was then, as it is now, situated in Limon, 50 miles away from the forecasters. Ordinarily, a low- quality reproduction of the radar picture was transmitted over a telephone line, and as it happened that afternoon, the line was down. "The guy in Limon," said Edward Zipser, chief of the interagency team planning the first phase of the National Storm Program, "had to tell the guy in Denver over the telephone a verbal description of what he thought he was seeing on the radar. Among other things, that did not lead to a flash- flood warning. One key to the storm program will be getting academic researchers and front-line forecasters together in experimental forecast centers, as they are in Profs - too often, the two groups tend to remain in their own separate worlds. Another key will be technological. The National Weather Service is just beginning to replace equipment that scientists consider hopelessly out of date. The radar, in particular, is a system based on 1950's technology, sensing only the reflectivity of moisture and hail. The next generation of radar can sense the detailed motion of air at all altitudes, even on a clear day, and the weather service hopes to have it in place nationwide by the end of the decade. But for now, local forecasters pretty much have to track storms with a grease pencil on the radar screen. If Congress is willing - and the weather community is pushing hard, with support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Defense - the field program will begin full operation in the Central United States in 1988, with Eastern and Western phases to follow thereafter. Experimental forecast centers are to be a major element, perhaps extending the Profs model to the 48-hour range, perhaps also using local versions of the computer models. "We do better and better all the time in handling the large- scale weather," Zipser said. But the things that affect people are invariably smaller- scale events. Where we really fall short is that, say, embedded in the general lousy weather on the East Coast is a 100-mile-wide band of very heavy snow. Or, embedded in the general lousy weather in the Midwest will be a squall line of tornadic storms. MacDonald, too, sees the Big Thompson flood as writing on the wall. What happened at Big Thompson was, there was a great big storm cell and it just didn't move. With the new equipment, he says, no forecaster could have missed it. We put the display in motion, and everything moves except this one big thunderstorm that's sitting over there, color- coded, a big red bull's-eye, so even if you're a dull-witted sort of meteorologist, after a while you say, my God, they must have 10 inches over there and it looks catastrophic. Now, if I tell you an hour in advance, you have plenty of time to save your life and your car, too. What people do, sitting there in their car as the water rises and the kids are crying, they say, 'Aw jeez, I don't want to get out and run for high ground, I'll wait another minute.' And pretty soon, the water's up and your car starts to move. As soon as the car is actually floating, you're dead. You can't get out of that car, because if you open the door the kids are going to drown. And you can't get to that high ground. the weather forecast in the first section of this newspaper, or listen to a forecast available from radio, television or telephone, you will be looking at or listening to a rather pithy vision of the future that may, of course, already have been sabotaged by events visible to you out the window. And right or wrong, the information will have a noticeable vagueness regarding geography and probability. The forecasts for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - two or three words - contain almost no information at all, particularly if the words are partly cloudy or chance of showers. Yet there is information out there today. People reading the computer output in Washington and Reading know an enormous amount about how the weather will unfold during the next five days. People studying local observations know a decent amount about what will happen today. If you had your own private meteorologist, you could get some of that information. For one thing, instead of listening to a report for the whole of the metropolitan area, you could specify that you were interested in the likelihood of showers this afternoon in the northern Bronx, let's say, or 25 miles away on Staten Island. For another, you could get a sense of how certain or uncertain the forecast was. Some days, perhaps when a broad blanket of high pressure lies calmly across a good part of the continent, forecasters would be willing to stake their careers on the reliability of their predictions. Other days, they know they are making no better than a rough guess. How can a newspaper reader or television viewer tell which it is? Improvements in forecasting, global and local, will only widen the gap between what meteorologists know and what they tell the public, unless the new forecasts are matched by new ideas in delivery. Computers in the home are certain to be a key. With technology that is already available, it is easy to imagine people getting graphic displays of up-to-the- minute local weather over the telephone line. It's so easy to imagine, in fact, that several private information networks have already been discussing the possibilities with the Weather Service. "I see the Government generating a digital forecast that has a great deal of accuracy and specificity," MacDonald says. The generation of the forecast is one thing, and the actual marketing of it is another. When Alexander MacDonald was growing up - when most of today's leading meteorologists were growing up - the future of weather and weather forecasting looked quite a bit different. There was an idea that modern human society would be free from the weather, its master instead of its victim. Geodesic domes would cover cornfields. Urban life would turn more and more indoors. Scientists would learn how to make rain and how to stop it. It's true that domes cover, if not cornfields, at least sports stadiums, and baseball has stretched into Canada and October. Air-conditioning and indoor walkways in cities have produced a buffer for seasonal extremes. "There's no doubt technology has made us less vulnerable," says Stephen H. Schneider, a climate specialist at NCAR. We have irrigation systems, we have high yield agriculture, we have an economic infrastructure which trades food. Fewer villages are wiped out by droughts, and when there is a cold winter, death rates from pneumonia are way down. Yet in the important ways we are as much in weather's grip as ever. Schneider and others note that as Western society has gotten complex and interdependent, it may have also gotten less resilient. Highway systems are built as close as possible to the level of traffic - so even a light snowfall paralyzes transportation. The interweaving of power nets makes small blackouts rarer, but it makes huge ones possible. Cities plan their water systems to meet average demand and maybe a little more - but weather, by its nature, is a thing that fluctuates wildly. When it comes to modifying weather and predicting it far into the future, the expectations of a generation ago seem farther away than ever. "The one area in which there has been this tremendous demonstrable success is the field of deterministic forecasting," says Austin Woods of the European Center. What we're doing today is strictly science fiction of the 1950's. But there were exaggerated promises made after World War II and in the 50's on the basis of highly questionable research in cloud physics and seeding. Those haven't materialized. The National Weather Service does issue 30- and 90-day forecasts, but it claims no great confidence in them. They are purely statistical and mostly subjective, predicting rough areas where temperature and rainfall will be above or below average. The only reason they are circulated is that demand for them is so great. As far as specific forecasts are concerned, the computer models are useless for such lengthy periods. Small errors that can be kept manageable for a few days eventually cascade upward until they are overwhelming. But climatologists at such centers as NCAR and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton are exploring the use of models for long-term predictions of averages, cold winters and rainy summers. And the European Center is considering a new effort in longer ranges. Odd things happen in weather sometimes, things that seem to defy the apparent unpredictability of events beyond two weeks into the future. Odd patterns develop, and the weather sticks in them. A phenomenon called blocking occurs - the normal flow of weather is interrupted, and for days or weeks the forecast model cannot quite cope. To some meteorologists, and to some mathematicians outside the weather business, that kind of persistent error is a sign that room may remain for further breakthroughs even in deterministic forecasting. "It's the things the models do wrong in a repeatful way that are encouraging to me," says Adrian Simmons, head of the numerical aspects section at the European Center. If it was just the usual cyclones and anticyclones forming and reforming, it wouldn't be so hopeful. But because some of these systems are long-lived, one feels sort of intuitively that they should be predictable. That is the hope, anyway, in a windowless central conference room of the National Meteorological Center, where a dozen of the Government's top meteorologists gather for the daily map meeting. They take seats facing a long pegboard wall covered with scores of weather maps - yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's - masses of computer-generated paper covered with blue ink. There are maps of North America and maps of the world, maps of the real weather and maps of the predicted weather. Each map is slightly different from the last, and the meteorologists begin trying to figure out why - why, when their computer has forecast one thing, nature has served up something else. Bonner is there, the director, sitting quietly toward the back and eating a roast beef hero. His deputy, Harlan Saylor, sits beside him, listening to the discussion and keeping one eye on a television monitor off to one side. The screen displays an up-to-the-minute satellite picture of a storm curling ominously up the Gulf of Mexico. To Saylor it looks as though the Texas coast is getting a blast of rain - and the center's computer failed to forecast it. No one is saying so, but it also looks to Saylor as though the competition in Reading did a good deal better. "The European Center forecast from yesterday would suggest that that system there will come inland and go up the Ohio Valley," he says. With the proper odds, I'd say we'll be feeling the effects of that system here in the Washington area. "Probably by next Thursday," says another meteorologist. Next Thursday is the Department of Commerce golf outing, and I don't know how many of them in the last six or seven years have been rained out. His colleagues start to laugh. Of course, that's in the realm of metameteorology if I start using external events to forecast the weather. Saylor gets up to go. "Don't knock anything if it's successful," he says.