Note: Due to staffing shortages in the National Weather Service, a program of temporary deployments has been ongoing in 2025 to help prevent the most impacted offices from having to close their doors at night. It’s similar to the time I spent at NWS Fairbanks in 2024, but on a broader scale. After talking it over with Elizabeth, we agreed that I should put my name in for a couple of offices in NWS’s Central Region in the middle of August. I was selected to work at Forecast Office Goodland, in the northwestern corner of the state of Kansas, from August 10-23. I kept a diary of my time up there (minus a long weekend in Colorado Springs that Elizabeth and I took on the days that I didn’t work. The only editing that has been done to the original diary entries is to add a few images where relevant.
Sun 8/10
Today marks the first day of my 2 weeks up in Goodland. It takes most of a day to drive up here, so I left fairly early in the morning (9:28 am to be exact – time for a game of CFB 26, a run with Scipio, and mowing the front lawn before I left). Elizabeth wasn’t happy to see me go. I know if we get to take a weekend getaway we’ll only be apart 5 days, then 5 days again next week, but it does feel like more. I appreciate her so much for being able to put up with the crazy things my job throws at me. I really do feel strongly about helping keep these understaffed offices open, or else I would have stayed at home where it’s nice and cozy.
Took an indirect route up to Goodland, cutting across Kansas on US-160 from Wellington to Harper, KS-14 north out of Harper, and then KS-42 west to Sawyer where I took US-281 north. This got me 5 new counties in southern Kansas – Harper, Kingman, Barber, Pratt, and Stafford. It made the drive new and unique too – lots of rolling hills, sunflowers, and farms with yellowing corn. The downside was 45 minutes added on to the drive. On the plus side, the Tigers game began not long after I left the interstate and lasted until I picked up I-70 in Russell, with Detroit beating the Angels 9-5. I also had time for calls with both parents and Elizabeth.
Goodland is about how I remember it – flat. There’s a cornfield right behind the Holiday Inn Express. There’s a KOA campground on the other side of the road, and beyond that a wheatfield. The hotel itself is quite nice. It must be either brand new or no more than a couple of years old based on the vibe to the place. My room is much more spacious than my room in Fairbanks was, and I’m on the second floor with a west window.
Took a nap not long after arriving and then walked across the street to Qdoba for dinner. Storms were rolling in off the high terrain and I could see cloud-to-ground lightning 50 miles away, so I ate out on a picnic table at the campground and waited until the storms got closer.
It was a peaceful feeling, and I was amused to see that many other people around were out storm-watching too. Deep down, all humans just want to look up at the sky, don’t we? Lightning has been flashing outside my window for the 90 minutes since I got upstairs. I’m choosing to look at that as a good omen for my time up here. Tomorrow starts a string of 4 straight 2:00 pm – 10:00 pm shifts for my first week. Pretty excited to meet everyone and get the work part of the trip underway!
Mon 8/11
First shift at WFO Goodland today. I’m on basically all evening shifts, so I actually had a good chunk of the day before anything was required of me. Decided not to hit any of the northwest Kansas to-do list to keep myself close to the office, which was honestly probably a mistake. It was such a beautiful morning with lows in the upper 50s. Felt like heaven after several months in the constant bathtub that is Norman in the summer. Went for a run to enjoy the morning. It was like a microcosm of Goodland itself – started in the 2020s hotel core, went under the Interstate and emerged in the 2000s style Super 8 and McDonald’s, then ran on towards the train tracks lined by cornfields and the newspaper office. It feels like an authentic small town here, for better and for worse.
Got lunch at L&T’s family restaurant. Ryan had told me the fried chicken was amazing. Like most Ryan recommendations, I thought it was… decent. Not the best fried chicken I’d ever had, but pretty good.
After that, went for a walk around town to kill some time, saw the World’s Largest Easel (seriously), and ended up at a park. Finally it was time to go to work.
When I got into the office, there were two forecasters working on shift; Alex (from WFO Lincoln, IL, on his last day of TDY), and Tyler (an actual Goodland guy). Also met Jesse the WCM. All three of them seemed like pretty cool guys. Alex and I overlapped for a good chunk of the evening shift and spent some time talking over what it was like out here.
And to be honest… it was very quiet. There were a few storms but Alex handled them, and then Clint did most of the routine duties when he got in. I understand that if you work here full-time. Doesn’t it get exhausting to have the same conversations about how to do stuff over and over and over again? I did get to do the TAFs. WFO GLD only has two TAF sites, Goodland and McCook. It didn’t take too long!
The office is definitely a bit more old-fashioned looking than I’m used to, and the location is in a cornfield at the edge of town, but in the end the equipment is the same and the mission is the same. Looking forward to settling in tomorrow.
Thu 8/14
Have not written for a few days because I’ve been fairly busy. I always end up with giant bucket lists on travel and end up going, going, going during my time off. Wouldn’t have it any other way, but it does make the time for writing a diary run a little short.
On Tuesday morning I drove about an hour southeast of Goodland to Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park. I love state parks like this where you’re literally driving through a wheatfield and then all of a sudden you hit the fenceline and boom, there’s the park. The badlands area was small (maybe 1-2 miles across and half a mile deep) but picturesque, and there was a nature trail that walked along the rim. I’ll write more about it + pictures in a blog post at some point.
Yesterday I played a round of golf at Sugar Hills Golf Club just outside of town. It was an interesting course. For one thing, it was the most expensive round of golf I’ve played all year: $65 for 18 holes and a cart! I’ve played some of the nicest public and semi-private courses in Oklahoma this season, so that was a bit of a shock to the system. Tee times weren’t necessary, which I guess makes sense when you’re the public golf course serving a town with a population of 4,500. Even if 1% of the population is golfing at any given moment, that means there’s 45 people on the course. I saw a few other groups, but not many. The course was in interesting condition – certainly nowhere near as daunting as playing in Fairbanks last year, where the greens were basically a carpet. If anything, the slopiness of the greens here provided the opposite challenge. Overall, I thought they did a nice job carving a golf course out of the literal open prairie, with views of the surrounding agricultural land and the Goodland skyline, plus showcases of natural gramma and buffalo grass in the roughs. I did not play terribly well on the front nine, but the back nine went a little better. Having decent short game can always carry you a long way.
Work has been fairly stress-free for the first three of my eight days in Goodland. The biggest issue was an AWIPS issue that persisted through the first half of my shift on Tuesday. WFO Dodge City was backing us up, and there wasn’t really any weather, so the main thing was just working with NCF to try and get everything back online. I’ve worked the last two days with Gerald from WFO Birmingham for the first half of my shift and Clint for the second half (there’s some overlap between the two). The first few hours have also given me a chance to meet the management team at the office. There certainly is a slower pace to operations in Goodland than there is in Norman, at least when active weather isn’t occurring. I’m trying to work myself into their normal rhythms, but there’s an adjustment to be made. I feel as though there are NWSChat posts to be made, social media posts to keep up on, and graphics to update, but they take a much more lax view on those at the Goodland office. In the end, it’s all about what your local partners are looking for.
One more day of work and then I’ll be heading to Colorado Springs for the weekend with Elizabeth. Since it’s only 2.5 hours away, I’m keeping myself as tentatively available in the evenings for storms, but the pattern looks pretty quiet.
Mon 8/18
Starting my second week here in Goodland. It’s a little unclear whether I’ll head back Friday or Saturday, but either way I won’t be in town much longer.
Elizabeth and I had a phenomenal trip to Colorado Springs. We spent Friday in Canon City and went to Royal Gorge Park as well as taking the Royal Gorge Railroad. Saturday morning, we drove up Pike’s Peak, then we spent the evening in old Colorado City. Sunday morning we visited Garden of the Gods. All of those things were awesome ways to spend a day and I’ll have longer blog posts about them later this fall (it’s going to be tough to blog everything with 3 weeks worth of trips coming up in September and October, yeesh). Back here in Goodland, the weather mostly cooperated. It looks like one or two special weather statements were necessary each day as a storm meandered its way out of Colorado but there wasn’t a single severe thunderstorm warning issued and there was never even a marginal risk of severe weather. That gave me peace of mind, because I didn’t come up here just to get a vacation in. Helping the understaffed GLD office was my top priority.
Seeing Elizabeth did remind me how much I will be happy to be back home. Normally after a vacation there’s the solace of going home to sleep in my own bed with my own wife, then waking up and getting to see my garden and my dog. In this case it was a drive back to a hotel on my own with no way to cook my own meals and not knowing anyone for a few more days. I don’t say that because I want to wallow in self-pity; given the choice I’d absolutely go back in time and tell myself to come up here again. There was a ton to learn about WFO operations and an amazing long weekend. But it will be kind of lonely here for the next few days.
Back to work at 2:00 pm today, tomorrow, Wednesday. A quick glance at the outlook shows that tonight could be a bit busier (slight risk). Perhaps I’ll get to issue some convective warnings, something I haven’t done yet. Whatever it is, I’ll be ready to help out.
Wed 8/20
Two more work shifts to go here in Goodland. This week I’m once again on evening shifts (at least until Thursday night, when I move back to 6:00 pm to 2:00 am). Last night was a lot of the same type of weather that I’ve seen since coming up here – storms fizzling out west on the Palmer Divide and a couple of pop-up storms across the eastern part of the area that didn’t do much. It was a quiet night on radar and I didn’t need to issue a single product.
Tuesday was different. That was quite a brouhaha. Gerald from NWS Birmingham was covering what we thought would be the primary line of storms coming across eastern Colorado while I handled developing storms along a convergence boundary roughly draped over I-70. Well, those storms kept growing and growing. I got to issue my first severe thunderstorm warning at NWS Goodland – and then a second, a third, and so on. At one point I think I was handling 5 or 6 warnings. That included a downburst signature right over southeastern Sherman County (the county Goodland is in) moving northwest toward town. It also included severe storms over Oakley and Quinter.
For a good long while, I wasn’t getting any severe reports. This isn’t really a surprise when you think about how unpopulated northwest Kansas is. I don’t like to let that affect my decision-making, especially when there were a bunch of reports of 52-57 mph wind gusts coming in. But a forecaster made a comment that we could probably let some of the marginal stuff go especially since 60 mph wind gusts don’t cause a lot of damage out here. These are the people with the local expertise, so I tried to heed the advice and eased off of some of the warnings. A few minutes later, we heard a rumbling noise outside and visibility dropped to zero out the window. I looked at radar and saw a tiny but intense downburst right over us. With a sinking feeling, I watched the anemometer outside record a gust of 64 mph. There was no way I’d have warned that storm ever, but it was still a lesson to not shift my paradigm and trust my gut. That lesson was reinforced a little later when we got a report that one of those storms near Oakley had removed the roof from a house. What I take away from this: trust myself, even when you aren’t physically seeing.
Yesterday I went to Mount Sunflower, the highest point in Kansas at 4,039 feet. Obviously there’s not actually a mountain; it’s just a relative swell in some of the rolling High Plains. It’s one county south of Goodland a mile or so inside the Colorado line and only accessible if you drive on dirt roads for about half an hour. This was a little bit sketchy with the rains the night before but my CRV handled it like a champion. The roads led me past alternating fields of lush wheat rippling in the wind, fields of sunflowers as far as the eye could see, and rolling rangeland that almost made me feel like I was back in the pre-European times. There was only one other car when I arrived at Mt. Sunflower – a guy with a decal on his car that said “Kansas Mountain Patrol” who seemed to be there to make sure the road up to the high point was accessible after the rain. He left and I had Mt. Sunflower to myself for a half hour. It was quiet – there was nothing to hear except planes far above, the wind whistling through the buffalograss, and the incessant flies up there. This is one of the best parts of TDYs – the chance to explore places I never would see otherwise.
Sat 8/23
After the previous post, I was down to my last full day in Goodland on Thursday 8/21. Unlike every other shift I worked, which were all from 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm, this last one didn’t start until 6:00 and lasted until 2:00 am. That left a lot of time for me to go to the last destination on my northwest Kansas bucket list – the Arikaree Breaks. They’re an area of badlands and river breaks on the Colorado/Nebraska/Kansas border area just north of St. Francis, maybe a 45 minute drive north of Goodland. There’s a self-guided drive through the heart of the breaks north out of town that Doug had recommended to me. The drive passed through a series of little creek valleys that were cool but nothing insanely special.
I did see a baby pronghorn, which was pretty cool.
Just when I was ready to write off the morning as an ok but somewhat underwhelming trip, the road went over one last rise and ACTUALLY entered the Arikaree Breaks. I was instantly glad I’d made the drive.
The evening shift at WFO Goodland was three TDYs – myself, Kyle from WFO Springfield, and Gerald from WFO Birmingham. It was the last day for all three of us, so we decided to have a cookout to celebrate. I brought a crockpot up to Goodland with the thought that I could save on a few meals by just making one for several days, but that turned out to be a bit impractical. The crockpot was plenty fine for making some corn on the cobs, though.
It was a quiet night in the office, and the sun soon set on my last shift.
It was one of the first shifts I’d ever had with solo shift coverage from 10:00 pm to 12:00 am, then a 2-hour overlap with Jerry, someone I hadn’t worked with before. Nice to meet you! Ok, nice to have met you. And that was that.
I was up bright and early on Friday morning to drive home. Talked to my mom on I-70, then flipped over and talked to my dad. Got an extremely late lunch with James in Wichita (including the most expensive frozen yogurt known to mankind), but had to rush it a bit to make it back into Norman in time for our fantasy football draft. Made it back by mid-evening. Scipio was very happy to see me.
Conclusion
The bottom line up front: I’m glad that I spent two weeks up in Goodland. It’s not a place I’d want to work full time, but the area has some truly beautiful spots to see, and it was great to learn about how other NWS offices and regions operate. This might be my last TDY adventure (at least for the foreseeable future), and I’m glad it worked out as well as it did!
