Remembering Mark Richards, the dean of D.C. weather observations
As his loss has shaken the local weather community, I reached out to Keith Allen, one of Richards’s close friends and colleagues, to write this remembrance.
Mark Richards was an icon in the Washington, D.C., weather community for 43 years as an observer at Ronald Reagan National Airport. A Vietnam War veteran and a larger-than-life figure, he came out of the Air Force to work at National Airport on Sept. 1, 1979. He never missed a day of work until he had a heart attack on the job in March 2014. That sidelined him for a while, but he came back to work in August 2014 and resumed his steadfast reliability, never late or absent.
Richards made history when he arrived at the airport in 1979. For the first time since the opening of National Airport in 1941, the weather reports were recorded and transmitted by observers who were not employees of the U.S. government. The National Weather Service had decided to turn these duties over to civilians in an effort to save money.
Richards’s work included taking weather observations to support aviation and forecasting. In addition, his job entailed maintaining daily and monthly climate records, including snowfall measurements, and providing the C & P Telephone Co. operators with hourly weather data. This data was brought into the phone company’s weather announcement system, which handled approximately 150,000 calls per day.
Richards was a talented musician, singer, entertainer and emcee. He also coached and refereed high school basketball and baseball. Most important, he was a man of outstanding integrity and sincerity, and an old-school good soul who was respected and loved by many.
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