JBER Public Affairs
1/8/2015 - JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARSON, Alaska -- Dana Walker is from a family focused on science. Her father and her siblings have careers in different sciences and Walker herself chose to become a meteorologist in the Air Force.
"I could have done practically anything and I picked weather," said Air Force Staff Sgt. Walker, 3rd Operations Support Squadron weather forecaster at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. "I was like 'atmospheric science - that sounds pretty awesome.'"
Walker said she welcomed the Air Force's opportunity to get out of her farming hometown, and instead found herself at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, for eight months of technical school. She then was stationed at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. The science-based job helped her keep a sense of the family business.
"My dad's kind of a rock nerd, or at least used to be, so he kind of had ground science covered," she said. "My dad's a geologist. He was always really enthusiastic about science career fields. He wanted us to grow up to be doctors, to look at the world in kind of a scientific manner and ask why."
Some meteorologists become Special Operations Weather Technicians, an expeditionary version of the career field known for keeping an eye to the sky in combat environments.
"I thought that's what I [would be] doing, and it's not," she said. "I had to start somewhere."
She gained job experience forecasting weather for the East Coast before applying for a special duty assignment with the Air Force Honor Guard.
"It was really interesting," she said. "I went to the D.C. area and could see the weather forecasts were true and I wasn't just making things up. I [served in the Honor Guard] for a few years, and then came back into weather. The honor guard was hard physically, but it was great."
Now stationed at JBER, Walker has had her first overseas experience.
"I just got back from a deployment in South America," she said. "We supported an intelligence unit for the Army."
Her mission was to watch for thunder storms. "Every time a storm would come through our little base, the power would cut off," she said. "We'd have to get a forecast from outside of the power grid.
We'd go outside, take observations and get elbow-deep in the rain and bugs and everything else out there.
"It's really an interesting mission because it's so different from [the Pacific Air Forces] and up here where we forecast predominantly for rain and we get maybe one thunderstorm a year.
Having a thunderstorm mission was really fun and exciting as far as the weather aspect goes."
Having returned to JBER, Walker has a fresh perspective on her mission.
"The really cool thing about this base is that you can really understand very small-scale effects because of all the mountains and the lack of data," she said.
"So if there's a helicopter in one of the valleys and it sits there running for an hour and a half, it disrupts the weather just enough that it might impact our base.
It's called the micro-scale effect of weather in this area."Winds greater than six knots normally come from a specific direction to funnel through the mountains, she said.
"It's really exciting for us. You might expect less fog or more fog, that type of thing. When Hilberg makes snow [they have snow cannons], it impacts the air field because of the extra moisture and ice crystals they drop in the air. If the wind's coming from the north, it'll move over our airfield and impact operations.
"Staff Sergeant Walker is one of the key players, one of only 11, to include myself and the rest of the leadership team," said Air Force Capt. Carl Densford, 3 OSS Weather Flight commander.
"When it comes to heavy snow, freezing rain, high winds, modern or severe turbulence that we could be seeing in the mountains or in the flying areas, the same thing with severe icing, our desk forecasters work directly with the supervisors of flying operations to make sure that the wing is protected. They help adjust the timing of when flights are going to happen based on the weather." Walker said she loves her career field. "This is my family business," she said. "My dad and I are the only earth-science-based people. That's me; I'm here and I'm learning about weather. I love logic and reason."
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