Summer haze and darkness obscure the skies over Martha's Vineyard, and a small plane plummets into the Atlantic, killing a president's son.

A blistering heat wave overwhelms electrical transformers in New York City and thousands of people lose the power to keep cool and stay open for business.

In both cases, it's a good bet that forensic meteorologists will be working alongside government investigators and civil litigators to assess the role of weather in the losses of lives and dollars.

Forensic meteorologists have not caught the attention of Hollywood producers who turned TV's Quincy into the country's best-known forensic pathologist. But it's not because they're not busy in high-profile investigations.

Weather experts were called in by lawyers in the snow-related bus accident in 1990 that injured singer Gloria Estafan and the auto accident on a rainy night in 1983 in which network newswoman Jessica Savitch drowned.

Joseph P. Sobel, a senior vice president at AccuWeather Inc., was hired by the prosecution in 1986 after Betty Wolsieffer was murdered on a dark and dewy night in Wilkes Barre, Pa. His job was to determine just how dewy it was.

It was so dewy, he testified, that the murderer's feet would have become soaked in it as he approached his victim's house. Any intruder would have left dewy footprints on the ladder, on the windowsill and inside the house.

"They found none of that," he said. "It suggested the ladder was not used to break into the house."

Instead, prosecutors argued that Wolsieffer was beaten to death by her husband in their Birch Street home. They said dentist Glen Wolsieffer set the ladder against the house only to bolster his claim that he had been surprised by "druggies" -- intruders who knocked him out then murdered his wife.

Wolsieffer was convicted and imprisoned. Sobel's testimony wasn't the clincher -- there was plenty of other evidence of Wolsieffer's guilt -- but it helped.

The Wolsieffer murder led to a 1992 book and a made-for-TV movie.

Weather conditions can figure critically in investigations of airplane accidents and the resolution of civil suits that follow.

After an American Airlines plane crashed June 1 at a storm-raked airport in Little Rock, Ark., forensic meteorologists across the country were buzzing about what they saw when they went to their computers and called up that night's radar and satellite data for Little Rock.

"Just looking at those storms, it was not the type of thing you'd fly in and land in," said H. Michael Mogil of Weatherworks in Rockville. "I'm sure the lawyers are very busy looking for meteorology experts to talk about the weather conditions."

Mogil is a former National Weather Service meteorologist who does weather education and forensic work.

The American Meteorological Society has 106 members -- three in Maryland -- who list forensic work among their specialties. The number is growing slowly, said AMS Executive Director Ronald McPherson.

"I would guess it has to do with the increasingly complex legal aspects of our society," he said. "As our society grows more complex, weather is a bigger factor in accidents, agriculture and corporate decisions."

Weather forensics is a relatively small enterprise for big-time national companies such as AccuWeather. Sobel said AccuWeather has 95 full-time meteorologists, six working in forensics.

But demand from lawyers is providing significant cash for smaller companies, solo practitioners and retired meteorologists. They provide information, write reports and provide expert testimony in court.

One of the Marylanders is James H. Meyer of Silver Spring. "I may have two or three cases going at once," said Meyer, 71, a former research meteorologist retired from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "It's very sporadic. It depends on how many people are suing other people."

Meyer helped on a case in Virginia a few years ago in which a woman claimed that her estranged husband had crept into her bedroom and shot her.

"The main thing was to prove the lighting conditions in that bedroom," he said. After figuring in the local weather on that night and the lack of moonlight, he said, "I was saying there was not enough light in that bedroom, that if she woke up and looked, she probably could not tell who it was.

"It turned out she shot herself. She was playing around with the gun, holding it next to her head."

After it went off and the bullet ripped through her ear, she tried to blame it on her husband, who was out of town.

That kind of case is memorable but is the exception.

"A lot of our cases are civil cases," said Sobel. "Somebody slips on a sidewalk, and the issue becomes, 'What were the weather conditions then, and what were preceding conditions?' " Disputes arise over construction delays and auto accidents.

The weather investigators collect reports from official and unofficial sources, data archives and witnesses, and assemble them into a logical, informed description of what happened.

When a warehouse in Waldorf collapsed under the weight of repeated snowstorms in January 1996, AccuWeather forensic meteorologist Stephen Wistar was hired by the building's insurer. His job was to figure out whether the building should have been expected to hold up under the snow.

Weather records showed that three storms piled up more than 23 inches of snow. Calculating melting rates, Wistar figured that what was left on the warehouse roof weighed 10 to 14 pounds per square foot.

Records indicated that such a snow burden occurs three times a century in that area. After adding in wind speeds and directions, and the slope of the roof, Wistar concluded that the roof was supporting drifts as high as 2 to 2 1/2 feet.

"The drifts weighed 33 to 41 pounds per square foot on the day of the collapse," he concluded. "In that part of the country, you would not design a roof for 30 pounds of snow per square foot."

The case was settled.

In a 1997 case, Mogil was hired by a court-appointed defense attorney whose client was arrested and charged with buying drugs. Police, who were watching from a secret position nearby, said they had a clear view of the transaction.

The official airport observations, however, spoke of drizzle and fog amid colliding weather fronts that night. Mogil found observations of conditions much closer to the crime scene by checking with volunteer observers organized by the weather service. He also went to the scene and noticed a cold stream nearby that would have contributed to even foggier local conditions.

Mogil was prepared to argue that police claims of a clear view of the drug sale were highly suspect. He even prepared a courtroom lab experiment to demonstrate how fog is formed.

The defense attorney alerted prosecutors to her trial strategy, and when the court date arrived, the four police officers in the case failed to appear. The case was dismissed.

"It was an issue of whether police saw what was going on or whether they were surfing [for addicts] and got lucky. It was a Fourth Amendment [improper-search] issue," Mogil said.

He said a junkie might have gotten a walk that time but that "if they buy me, they get the truth."

Pub Date: 8/10/99