I ran into a funny article a few weeks ago when I was looking for stuff about meteorology. It included a list of actual names of weather people, the folks who provide our daily doses of information about our atmospheric conditions.
A couple of my favorites from the list: Ray Ban, of the Weather Channel; Storm E. Field, of WABC, New York; Amy Freeze, also of WABC (if she has nieces and nephews, do they call her Auntie Freeze?); Sunny Haus, of KARE in Minneapolis; Dallas Raines, of KABC in Los Angeles; Ken Weathers, of WATE in Knoxville; and Larry Sprinkle, of WCNC in Charlotte.
I was doing a little research because I was curious about the business of weather prognostication and the amount of interest it receives in our world. After watching a weather forecast on a Milwaukee TV station a while back, it occurred to me that we place a very heavy emphasis on the subject.
During the course of a 30-minute 10 p.m. news broadcast, the weather (in two segments) took eight minutes, and then there was a 30-second recap at the end of the show. Take out the typical eight minutes for commercials, and the “newscast” devoted 15 1/2 minutes to all the rest of the news! And the “rest of the news” also included stories about storm damage in the area.
Every TV and radio station in the country employs meteorologists to bring us news about the weather. The station I was watching (WTMJ) employs five of them. The Weather Channel is devoted to this endeavor 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Weather Channel employs 19 “meteorologists and personalities” and six “experts” as its on-air crew. Jim Cantore is my favorite; he loves to stand out in the wind and rain of hurricanes and impress us with his gutsy courage.
But why are they called meteorologists? The use of the term dates back to early Greece. The famous philosopher Aristotle wrote a treatise titled “Meteorologica” in 340 B.C. His paper covered the totality of that era’s knowledge of weather and climate. In ancient Greece, anything that was suspended in or fell from the sky was called a “meteor.” That included rain, snow, hail and even meteoroids and rainbows.
Since most of what he wrote dealt with the weather, the term “meteorology” came to be used when referring to the science of weather and atmospheric studies. So today, a meteorologist is a scientist who studies weather and the Earth’s atmosphere, not meteors.
I read that bad weather is good for ratings. Really good. When there’s a big storm coming, some TV stations will get three or four times as many people watching as normal. News directors love it. And the meteorologists become stars.
I found out that there is no legal definition of meteorologist, so anyone can call himself a meteorologist and get away with it. Al Roker, for example, although he is famous as a TV weatherman on the Today Show and is featured on the Weather Channel, does not have a degree in meteorology.
David Letterman started his career as a weatherman on Indianapolis television station WLWI, no degree in meteorology. He once predicted hail stones “the size of canned hams.” And on another occasion, he said, “From space you can see the border between Indiana and Ohio has been erased. I’m not in favor of this.” Sounds like my kind of weather guy!
I’m going to end this nonsense with a couple of jokes, OK? The first is about a ship’s captain who radios a lighthouse keeper, “Radio reception is very bad. Please spell out weather report.” The keeper replies, “W-E-T-H-O-R R-I-P-O-R-T.” The captain says, “My goodness, that’s the worst spell of weather we’ve had in a long time.”
The second is a guy who, although he was a qualified meteorologist, ran up a terrible record of forecasting for the TV news program. He became something of a local joke when a newspaper began keeping a record of his predictions and showed that he’d been wrong almost 300 times in a single year. That kind of notoriety was enough to get him fired. He moved to another part of the country and applied for a similar job. One blank on the job application called for the reason for leaving his previous position. He wrote, “The climate didn’t agree with me.”
Marv Holowinski and Karl Klopotic, my apologies!
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