Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

John Teeter Will Receive Special Recognition Thursday At Kiwanis Meeting

John W. Teeter of Prescott will receive the John Campanius Holm Award - named after the first person to gather weather information in colonial America - on Thursday November 6 at 12 noon at Wolves Drive-In during the Kiwanis Club meeting.

The presentation will be made by the National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Commerce officials, including meteorologist Lee Harrison, data acquisition program manager Marion Kuydendall, and Richard Ogle and Steve Griffin, hydrometerorological technician from Shreveport, La.

Teeter has been a volunteer observer for the weather service 31 years. He is one of 25 people selected annually from about 12,000 volunteers for the award. He has an official National Weather station, consisting of a standard rain gauge, a Fisher and Porter recording rain gauge for collections and recording of data, and a digital maximum-minimum thermometers.

Teeter phones in reports of temperature and precipitation to a touch-tone computer at the weather office in Shreveport and a montly summary of daily observations to the Shreveport office.

The data is then processed and sent to the National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, N.C,., where it is computer-processed, archived and published in the Arkansas hourly precipitation data and Arkansas climatic data publications.

The data service makes a great contribution to the field of meteorology and is essential for studies prepared by agencies in the private sector, the nation's weather service, the Corps of Engineers and other agencies.

The John Campanius Holm Award was created to honor Cooperative Observers for outstanding accomplishments in the field of meteorological observations. It is named for a Lutheran minister, the first person known to have taken systematic weather observations in the American colonies.

Rev. Holm make weather observations, without the aid of instruments, in 1644 and 1645 near the present site of Wilmington, Del. His son later had these observations published.

From hundreds of nominations each year, no more than 25 of these awards are presented annually to the volunteer observers. The certificate is signed by the administration and presented by local National Weather Service representives.

Two of the more prestigious awards are the Thomas Jefferson and John Campanius Holm awards. Both were created for the National Weather Service in 1959 to honor cooperative weather observers.

These two awards are reserved for the very best observers. Whereas many awards are given on the basis of longevity, these two are given based on merit.