Weather Is His Commodity : Agriculture Department Meteorologist Moves Markets

WASHINGTON — Norton Strommen may not be a household name, but when the chief meteorologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture speaks, commodity traders listen and markets move.

Frost in Brazil, drought in the Midwest, floods in Australia send Strommen and his team scurrying to calculate the impact on the world’s food supply.

Players on the major commodity exchanges hang on his every word, because these estimates can have a major effect on prices, making or losing millions of dollars depending on whether a trader was expecting the price to rise or fall.

Strommen’s data is used by the Agriculture Department to help run its multibillion-dollar marketing and farm programs.

The department started taking its weather intelligence very seriously after the “Great Grain Robbery” in the 1970s.

The Soviet Union bought nearly 10% of the U.S. grain crop at bargain prices because no one knew how seriously drought had hit the major grain areas of the eastern Soviet Union in the summer of 1972.

Detailed weather monitoring “was one way of ensuring that no time in the future we would be caught unaware of the magnitude of crop failures any place in the world,” Strommen told Reuters.

Strommen joined the department as top man in 1980, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Arriving at his office at 6:30 each morning, Strommen wades through an avalanche of charts and other overnight weather data before preparing a report for the agriculture secretary.

Much of his time is spent analyzing data and writing reports, punctuated by his weekly farm radio broadcasts on Tuesdays and farm television appearances on Wednesdays.

However, Strommen still finds time to serve on at least 10 different committees, including a special NATO science panel on global and environmental change.

Trading in sensitive, weather-driven commodities markets can be something of a poker game in which feelings as much as information can be decisive, said Glenn Grimes, agricultural economist at the University of Missouri.

“Anyone that gets the respect Norton does starts having an impact,” Grimes said.

Strommen and his team aim at keeping the agriculture secretary informed within 12 hours of any significant weather event anywhere in the world.

For example, the United States was able to identify a market for U.S. corn in South Africa during the mid-1980s well before that normally corn-exporting country realized how seriously its crop was damaged from drought.

Agricultural meteorologists don’t forecast tomorrow’s weather--a common misperception of their role.

Instead, they convert weather data, monitored daily for all major commodity crop areas around the world, into projections on crop growth, conditions and yield potential.

The raw information comes from satellites owned by the United States, Japan and Europe. Strommen also relies on a vast network of colleagues at universities who provide data unavailable in Washington. Despite the huge amounts of money at stake, most commercial users have no major complaints with the crop weather summaries provided by the agriculture meteorologists.

Bill Biedermann of Allendale Inc., agriculture consultants in Crystal Lake, Ill., said if you look at their overall record they’re “doing a great job. It’s a tough business.”