NOAA honor: Rosalia’s weather duo will get Jefferson award

Weather observers William and Alice Hofmann of Rosalia will be recognized by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association’s National Weather Service for their more than 40 years of weather reporting.

The Hofmanns will receive the agency’s Thomas Jefferson Award for outstanding service in the Cooperative Weather Observer Program. The award is the agency’s most prestigious; only two presented this year to weather observers from the Western region.

The Hofmanns will receive the award at 10 a.m. Friday, Oct. 12, at the Brass Rail in Rosalia.

“Cooperative observers are the cornerstone of weather data collection and analysis,” said Susan Nelson, regional program manager. “Without long term, accurate weather observations taken by volunteer observers, scientists could not begin to adequately describe the climate of the United States. We can’t thank the Hofmanns enough for their years of service to America.”

Beginning in 1967, the Hofmanns took over reporting the weather from a neighbor.

“I was interested in what the different areas of the county experienced,” William Hofmann said.

The Hofmanns have a weather station in their back yard.

“We’d mosey out to the weather station, twirl the thermometers, go to the precipitation tanks and measure snow or any other precipitation, and write everything down,” Alice Hofmann said. They mailed three copies of the information to three different locations. All of this took at least an hour, if they didn’t have to shovel a path through the snow or shovel snow from around the weather station.

Technology changed the Hofmann’s reporting system. Last year, NOAA’s National Weather Service installed an electronic device at the house that records the high temperature, low temperature and precipitation. They can retrieve all the information from the comfort of their living room and transfer the readings from an iPad.

With the new technology, they rarely need assistance because they can retrieve weather statistics from the past month.

William Hofmann said the biggest event they reported was when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. “It was very interesting to measure the ash and the progress of the ash,” he said.

The Hofmanns observed the best and the worst weather for the past 43 years. During this time, temperature extremes have been recorded along with flooding rains, blizzards and snow as deep as 40 inches. William recalls a very warm 106 degrees and also remembers recording 31 degrees below zero in 1968.

Married for 55 years, both are retired, William from 45 years of farming and Alice from being a farm wife and an appliance manager at St. John Hardware. Both say they plan to keep on reporting on the weather.