by Cassady Sharp / photograph by Naomi Johnson

It’s a normal morning and you’re en route to the office. You’ve walked this path many times, and your memory will tell you where to turn. On this particular morning, however, the street signs are gone. The buildings and landmarks are gone. The light is gone. There is only the noise of cumbersome buses and fast cars. 

Imke Durre relies on her memory every morning to guide her to a corner office at the National Climatic Data Center off Patton Avenue in downtown Asheville. She embarks on her daily voyage from a Coxe Avenue apartment with the faith that the streets are the same, the sidewalks remain and her building still stands. There are roadblocks, literally, interrupting her commute and rearranging the space in her mind. She crosses these bridges when she comes to them, or rather, she crosses over Haywood when the sidewalk is closed across from Pritchard Park. An obstacle like a sidewalk closure might take Durre several minutes to detect, since it’s her tapping cane telling her what’s in front of her.

On a normal morning, Durre doesn’t let any of this bother her. She’s got work to do. A colossal amount of climate data isn’t going to organize itself.

The German-born climate scientist has a thing for weather, or more specifically, atmospheric sciences. Born with cataracts in both eyes, she’s never seen a blue sky or gloomy storm clouds. It’s the overwhelming data that interests her, and she records the numbers from a Braille display on her computer. She often works with a colleague who can read everything she enters from the Braille keyboard on a computer screen. Then she moves her cursor across the words, reading what the screen says by following the Braille dots on her keyboard. To an outsider, the fact that Durre can’t see might seem to add unimaginable difficulty to otherwise routine situations (not to mention an already-complex occupation). But Durre, 36, and her supportive family have never seen her disability as limiting. Over the course of her life, they’ve mastered—and in some cases created the technologies themselves—to help Durre live easier, which means she’s been able to dedicate her formidable intellect to one of the most contentious environmental issues of our time.

Wired For Work Imke Durre in class at age 13. Her father Karl Durre, a mathematician and computer scienctist, designed special software to translate Braille input onto a screen. Durre’s fluency with numbers must have been in the genes. Her father, Karl Durre, was a mathematician who taught computer science at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. Her mother Inge pursued a graduate degree in special education at the University of Northern Colorado. Durre attended a school for the blind not far from Karlsruhe for five years. She needed those years to learn the complicated language of Braille. Her mother had concerns, however, about the opportunities Durre would miss if she continued to attend a school for the blind. "Imke wasn’t like the other children. She would have been deprived of everyday experiences," Inge explained from her office in Arizona where she works as the Foundation for Blind Children’s resource center director. "School for the blind is not a real-life experience. Everything is labeled. It’s not like that in the real world." 

The year Durre was to begin the fifth grade, her father wanted to connect the VersaBraille, an electronic Braille reading and writing device, to her personal computer. This would allow Durre’s Braille input to instantly translate into a written format for her teachers to view. But the software didn’t exist. So Durre’s father conceived his own with the help of one of his computer science students. They completed the BrailleButler for her Apple IIe the night before Durre was to attend a regular secondary school in 1983. The BrailleButler let Durre sit in a class with other students, take notes by typing and—though she could speak perfectly well—take written quizzes and tests through her personal computer.

The transition to regular school wasn’t all that difficult, Durre recalls, and her mother was relieved to see her daughter evolve socially in a realm outside of the visually impaired. "The only concern I ever had was social development and for her to be satisfied intellectually," Inge explains. "She’s never felt comfortable in groups for the blind. I always encouraged her to join groups to make friends, but when she went to a meeting for the American Council of the Blind in Seattle, she felt out of place. It’s not her level of intellect."    

Durre’s mother first sparked her interest in the weather at age 10 by reading the daily forecasts to her from the newspaper. Then the family, including her younger brother Holger, moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, when Imke was 14. Her father continued his teaching career in the computer science department at Colorado State University, and her mother continued to read newspaper forecasts aloud. During this time, Durre started to realize she had a real knack for all things stormy, sunny and partly cloudy. She began recording and organizing data from cities across the country in her computer for fun. In 1991, her mother submitted Durre’s records to a local newspaper when the state’s assistant climatologist admitted in an interview that he didn’t know the earliest point in the year that Fort Collins’ temperature had exceeded 100 degrees. (It took Durre half a day to answer that question using her own data.) The next year, the climatologist offered Durre a summer job.

Next, she got a degree in applied mathematics at Yale University, the first time Durre had lived away from home. She found it difficult to live with three other girls who wouldn’t leave things in places where Durre remembered them to be. When the telephone rang, Durre couldn’t find it because another roommate had left it somewhere else. When she chose the University of Washington’s atmospheric sciences graduate program in Seattle, she convinced her parents to let her live alone for the first time. Well, somewhat alone. She unknowingly shared her apartment with a bird for four days. "I kept feeling something unusual and hearing rattling noises. I thought I was going crazy," Durre laughs. "Once in a while, situations come up where I wonder ‘hmmmm…how do I deal with that?"’

For as dry and serious as climate science can be, Durre seems to have a mischievous streak and livens things up for herself. One way she deals with irritating situations is by writing lyrical limericks. She even sent one that she wrote for her late father to the NPR show Prairie Home Companion, though it never aired. When weather, of all things, forced Durre to abort her trip to the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Texas, she came up with this little ditty: "En route to the AMS meeting/ Where it had been raining and sleeting/ Some people got stuck/ Had so little luck/ That just getting home meant succeeding."

Of course, life’s not all fluttering birds and clever rhymes for Durre. From her bare-walled office, she does the dirty work of climatology, managing mammoth amounts of national and global data, consolidating redundant reports, identifying trends and reporting them in a user-friendly format. She’s currently working on two data projects and an analysis of temperature variability in the United States and Canada. "I like numbers with a purpose, numbers that tell me something," Durre says. In fact, she’s somewhat hesitant to speak too firmly about global warming until she’s absorbed more data to support it."I have no doubt that there are dramatic changes going on, and the vast majority is from human influence. The problem is that it’s a question of science, not politics."

A fellow scientist at the NCDC, Matthew Menne, often sits by Durre’s side, loyally planted in front of a glowing screen. They first started working together in 2004 when Durre’s wrists needed a break from her constant rapid-fire typing and Braille reading.  They’ve been cracking computer codes and spotting weather patterns together ever since. "Imke has a way of conceptualizing space in her mind," Menne says. "She knows the layout of the streets in Asheville better than I do. She has such an enhanced way of organized, logical thinking. She’s an amazing person to know."

Pain in Durre’s wrists, a nerve inflammation that her doctor calls a mechanical dysfunction, caused her to curtail her playing piano six years ago. She now uses voice input and output software to do everything from reading books to sending emails, typing occasionally when necessary. She sees this as somewhat of a good thing. "Matt and I probably would not have started working together if I hadn’t needed some help with my typing." This is Durre’s outlook on most things in life. Whether downtown construction impedes her walk to work or the Pritchard Park drum circle drowns out the warning sounds of oncoming cars, Durre just doesn’t seem to get upset. "She always makes the best of every situation," her mother boasts. "She had open heart surgery when she was five, and the surgeon said she must have seven times the energy of a normal child."

Yes, Durre is unusually intelligent. But she’s far from snobby, seeing her approach to the world as simply logical. She makes jokes about old computer software and algorithms, but she doesn’t make you feel like an imbecile like the president of your high school’s math club did. She makes you really, really want to get it. For most people, reading her quality control data management reports would be like trudging through a swamp of technical jargon and mathematical logic. But meeting her makes you feel relieved that the important numbers are being crunched by someone smarter than you—someone blizzards, tornadoes and hurricanes smarter than you.