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New Spin on Forecasting

Denise Flaim | Animal House

January 15, 2002

A SELF-PROCLAIMED "weather nut," Gary Stone of Centerport is obsessed with The Next Big Storm.

To predict it, he consults computer models, barometric pressure readings, and his secret weapon:

Krystle the Siberian husky.

Krystle, it turns out, is the Mrs. G. of dogdom. For most of her 10 years, Krystle has predicted storms - very accurately, her supporters say - by "spinning" her dog houses: Using her teeth to rotate the heavy plastic igloos in her outdoor kennel, she maneuvers them so that once the rain or snow arrives, not a drop or a flake lands inside.

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"All Siberians can smell snow coming, and they'll start to howl," says Krystle's owner, who is a long-time breeder and obedience trainer. But the house-spinning is something entirely different. "I've had Sibes for 30 years, and she's the only one who's ever done it."

Because she doesn't want camera crews and curiosity seekers making pilgrimages to her Long Island home, Krystle's owner prefers not to be identified. Not that they would see anything anyway: Krystle is secretive about her spin sessions, and her owner has only caught her in the act once.

Enter Gary Stone, 45, whose wife, Suzanne, brings her dog to training classes run by Krystle's owner.

"I tend to be very unspiritual, very scientific, generally not believing in these kinds of things," says Stone, who is president of the Long Island Weather Observers and is a cooperative weather observer for the National Weather Service. When his head is not in the clouds, Stone, a medical doctor, is chief of pathology at Huntington Hospital.

For the two years, Stone has been tracking the actions of Krystle and her protege, a 4-year-old husky named Kruiser who lives with her and has started to mimic her behavior.

"I started out to see if what they were doing was accurate," says Stone, adding he was not disappointed: Over the past year they have accurately heralded all the region's major snowstorms.

The routine is always the same: About 48 hours before a storm hits, the dogs start acting up - circling, pacing, jumping and woo- wooing - as well as turning the dog houses. That continues for about six to 12 hours before the storm hits; then they quiet down and basically collapse.

Looking for a correlation between weather indicators and the dogs' behavior is "a little complicated," says Stone, running down the list of things he first thought might set them a-spinning: "Will the storm have a lot of wind? Is it maybe a drop in air pressure? Is it going to snow?"

In the end, says Stone, he thinks the key is to be found in a storm's vertical velocity. "Storms are vortexes," he explains, "and wind spins around them in counter-clockwise way, called vorticity." On all the storms the dogs reacted strongly to, "the vorticity figure was actually very impressive. Maybe that's one of the things they're sensing - when a storm's going to have this spin and lift to it."

A case in point was the Dec. 30, 2000, snowstorm that left the region blanketed in more than a foot of snow. "On Monday, the weathermen were talking about potential for a big storm by the weekend," Stone remembers. But as he scoured computer models of the storm, "Tuesday and Wednesday's runs didn't look so interesting. By Thursday morning, it looked like, yeah, there's going to be some snow, 3 to 6 inches."

Krystle and Kruiser disagreed. On Wednesday night, their owner reported that the dogs were just beside themselves.

"Wait a minute," Stone remembers thinking. "This storm's not supposed to come until Saturday afternoon. This is the real first test."

And the huskies passed it with flying colors. Raging on all through Thursday and into Friday, they finally collapsed on Friday evening.

Saturday dawned to a whiteout, deposited the night before at the rate of 3 inches an hour.

"It probably isn't a major surprise to me that there is some way that dogs can sense weather," says Stone, who adds that he is "impressed" by the dogs' forecasting ability. "They evidently have learned to take that knowledge and use it for something."

That's not to say that Krystle and Kruiser prognostications are perfect: "Determining rain versus snow is still hard," says Stone. "I'm still learning to interpret their signals." Also, the vorticity figure of a storm may be high, but that doesn't always result in a tremendous amount of stuff falling from the sky; instead, says Stone, a storm might have a great intensity, but be of short duration.

Still, the dogs' track record seems to be as good as most weathermen's - maybe better.

"I think I know enough about them that I can use them as a forecasting tool," says the ardent weather buff about his canine consultants. "So far they've been unerring - they have yet to miss."