Morning comes early for clandestine weathermen.

Long before the sun bobs up over the Gulf of Mexico, SOWT pickup trucks and muscle cars are lined at the main gate of Hurlburt Field, the home of Air Force Special Operations Command on the Florida Panhandle.

Their first official workouts start at 7 a.m. But even at this hour, SOWTs are taught to be reading the skies. Forgot to roll up your windows on a rainy day? You owe the team a thousand push-ups. Blow an outlook for chilly weather? You aren’t allowed to go home for your coat.

SOWTs don’t just do the weather. They leverage it. They use the morning dew to erase a platoon’s tracks or the wind to muffle a helicopter or the shadow of a mountain to shelter the wounded. They also watch for obstacles and opportunities, cataloging where the soil is soft, the rivers are swift, the snow is loose, the fog is dense or the apples are juicy. They make America a home-turf warrior no matter the country.

“We live out our forecasts,” said Jonathan Sawtelle, an angular young officer who, after serving as the SOWT’s director of operations last year, is set to start a more senior forecasting job at Joint Special Operations Command. “We’re sensors, human sensors, and that’s the magic of the SOWTs.”

Video: Being a SOWT To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

But let’s be honest.

There’s a joke here, something comical about sending a meteorologist to war. It has to do with our image of the ordinary forecaster: that second-rate scientist who spends his life indoors, predicting the outdoors, and getting it wrong.

“Meteorologists everywhere are weenies in the extreme,” the author and aviator William Langewiesche wrote in 2008. “They are twerps. Dweebs. Instrument tappers. Professional virgins.”

Before the new career code, many SOWTs fit this description. They were drawn from the Air Force’s conventional weather centers, which tended to make them meteorologists first, warriors second. The new SOWTs — and the best of the old ones — are a different breed. They are warriors first, meteorologists second.

“They’re stronger, faster and brighter than we ever were,” said Tony Carson, a SOWT officer who came in under the old system. “The challenge now is pulling these guys back, not pushing them forward.”

There are about 120 SOWTs spread across three newly created Special Tactics teams, with two more planned by 2020. These teams comprise combat controllers, weathermen and medics, among other Special Tactics airmen. If the Air Force is right, these men — there are no women allowed — represent a widening component of U.S. special operations.

They are essential in combat, dealing death from above, but they can also save lives, coordinating rescues and re-supply drops — all while keeping an eye on the unfriendly skies. Climate change is expanding the need for such work, according to the Pentagon, which anticipates a greater number of humanitarian relief and disaster response missions.

“Can you attribute any given weather event to climate change? No,” said Sawtelle. “But is Special Tactics there and ready to take action? Absolutely. We’re a fast-reacting force, standing ready to respond to climate disasters.”

SOWTs are a tiny slice of the special operations machine but a unique one, a rare blend of brawn and brains. Their careers start with a standard military intelligence test. To qualify for the pipeline, SOWTs need a minimum score that’s 20 points higher than what is required by anyone else in Air Force Special Tactics — higher, in fact, than almost every job in the military other than code breaker.

Gallery: SOWTs in the field

They need that extra intellectual firepower to survive forecasting school at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi: 30 weeks of advanced meteorology, interspersed with workouts and trips to the mess hall.

The SOWTs have to unlearn as much as they learn. The “thin air” around us is in fact thick, for example, dense enough to support flight. An object that’s “light as air” is actually, as a matter of science, exerting a ton of atmospheric pressure per square foot.

They learn that trying to predict the weather is as hard as following a wave across the open seas or predicting the first bubble in a slowly boiling pot of water. But good forecasts shape history. One Air Force academic traces the relationship between weather and war to the first caveman who scored his club handles for skull-bashing in the rain.

America itself was founded on the exploitation of fog, snow and favorable tides. The Continental Army used a shroud of low clouds to hide from the British bayonets on Long Island. General George Washington then crossed the Delaware in a blizzard, surprising the enemy and turning the war.

The lore is endless, which is why the military has always been one of meteorology’s biggest patrons. Between 1870 and 1955 it launched the forerunner of the National Weather Service, opened the first graduate school of meteorology, and funded the first computer-generated forecasts. These days, the military is working to loop the world’s data together, flow it through an ensemble of models, and forecast the Earth as a single entity. Here’s the outlook, it’ll say: from three days to three decades.

But even then there are likely to be SOWTs. During training, they get a glimpse of their essential value. They’re shown a nighttime picture of the Earth. The cities glow but the land is largely dark and desolate, “data sparse.” What’s the weather like there? No one can be sure.

This may come as a surprise to Americans, the world’s most wired people for weather. We have about 10,000 professionally run surface weather reporting stations, the same amount as the rest of the world combined. We also have about 150 radar centers; some regions of Africa have none. Asked to name what parts of the globe lacked for surface weather data, one researcher said, “The whole southern hemisphere, really.”

The key to a perfect forecast is a perfect picture of the atmosphere, from the edge of space down to the tip of a farmer’s wet finger. It’s an image scientists can’t get from a climate-controlled room. They know the physics that govern the sky. Their supercomputers can stay ahead of the clouds. They just can’t get the numbers right in the first place.

Insufficient or faulty ground data is a major reason why forecasts curdle within a week, and go totally rancid after 10 days. Even a same-day satellite forecast is a spaghetti plot of best guesses and city-sized generalities. That won’t do in war, where the weather is never neutral.

As SOWTs master the language of the sky, they also learn to survive under it. The physical side of the SOWT pipeline may be an even greater test than the intellectual side. It starts with a 500-meter surface swim, two 25-meter underwater swims, a 1.5-mile run and timed bursts of pull-ups, sit-ups and push-ups.

Pass that and you qualify for a “selection course,” a two-week cycle of spittle and sweat at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Here SOWTs get their ribs kicked by drill instructors while the anguish of muscle failure eats at their minds. They jump off cliffs, run through rivers, drag truck tires and perform everyday calisthenics made more torturous by a spray of water to the face, anything to trigger a fear of drowning.

“We’re here to push them, to show them that their bodies and minds are capable of handling much more than they think,” said one instructor featured in a SOWT recruiting video released online. “We’re looking for that alpha male drive,” said another instructor.

If the SOWTs survive this hell, there are others waiting, including five kinds of survival school and a disaster-movie sequence of severe weather observations, tactical training and demolition. Throughout this regime prospective SOWTs are constantly being evaluated. Most candidates never get accepted into the pipeline. Of those who do, fewer than one in five get their grey beret, according to Lee, the senior recruiter.

Recent recruits include wrestlers, water polo players, surfers, runners and a lineman pulled off an NFL practice squad. The common denominator is a knack for tamping down the body’s instinct to scream. “I’m leaving with a grey beret or a body bag,” said one new recruit, entering the pipeline this fall. He’s 17.

“These guys are certified mental and physical studs,” said Sawtelle.

“ They’re stronger, faster and brighter. The challenge now is pulling these guys back, not pushing them forward. Tony Carson

They’re also deadly operators. Before they deploy, all SOWTs get a coat of battle paint at Hurlburt Field, home of the Air Force’s advanced combat training school. It’s a sprawling gym, pool and classroom complex, and on a recent visit the facility felt like a stroll through the pages of a spy novel.

Cell phones get locked up in little boxes. The cinder blocks above the urinals are covered with one-pagers on countries in West Africa and Southeast Asia. Everywhere the walls are talking, reminding young airmen about the need for strict operational security.

“Loose pieces of talk are put together by our enemies for victory,” warns one poster.

“This is a 100 percent shred zone,” notes another.

In a warehouse across the street, the SOWTs keep their personal “cages”: wire mesh closets packed like Hollywood costume trailers and piled high with beef jerky and books.

“A lot of guys read a lot of books,” said Sawtelle, walking down the aisles. He pointed out a particular favorite in one locker: “The Art of War,” an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu.

“Know the weather,” Sun Tzu advised around 320 B.C. “Your victory will then be total.”

Air Force special operators support Army, Navy and Marine special operations detachments, which means SOWTs have the guns, radios and battle dress to join any team at any time.

Sawtelle stopped at a red door with a security keypad and another little locker for phones.

“We’re behind every SOF (special operations forces) mission,” he said, before saying goodbye. “Weather is always the first slide.”

But not everyone in the military seems to care. The most celebrated soldiers are the ones who most directly take enemy lives and most often lose their own in the process. In Air Force Special Tactics those soldiers are the combat controllers, the ones who call in bombs in a firefight.

Inside the main doors of the Special Tactics Training Complex there is a wall of framed photos, almost all of them fallen combat controllers. In the auditorium two combat controllers recently addressed visitors (and potential recruits) from the Ultimate Fighting circuit. “I know how it sounds,” one of the men said, as he neared the end of a bloody anecdote about his time in Afghanistan, “but just before a firefight, I start to smile.”

This kind of machismo may be necessary, given the work of special operations, but it also means that soldiers sometimes don’t respect the weather. A couple of months after the auditorium speeches a team of Special Tactics airmen huddled in tents on Alaska’s Manatuska Glacier. They were on a training mission, an effort to find a body in one of the area’s seemingly bottomless crevasses.

They were supposed to have SOWTs with them, testing the ice and snowpack, gauging the depth and swiftness of a nearby river. If the team found a body — an actual dummy hidden in the terrain — the SOWTs would forecast for an incoming helicopter. But the SOWTs were called away, sent on a real-world mission at the last moment, according to the Air Force.

The combat controllers and medics didn’t mind. Some used a smartphone app, which failed to predict an afternoon of high winds and rain that might have flipped tents if they had not been angled correctly by a local guide. Others planned to ford the river — until another guide warned them of a dangerous drop in the middle.

Even when the SOWTs are around, the rougher soldiers don’t necessarily see their value. Some prank the SOWTs, stuffing their bags or lockers with balloons. Others ignore the SOWTs entirely — too tough to worry about the weather, too young or inexperienced to realize they should.

One day last spring, dozens of combat controllers filed into a room ahead of a parachute exercise. They were joined by a smaller number of combat medics and an even smaller number of SOWTs. The room darkened as soundproof hatches closed over the windows and a projector turned on.

The young combat controller in charge of the briefing said, “Here’s the weather report.”

He added, “If anyone cares.”