Stuff You Should Know - How TV Weathercasters Work

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

TV weather people can seem corny and maybe a little nerdy, but beneath that toothsome exterior lies the heart of a lonely warrior of science, one who is often overlooked as the hardest working member of the news team. Learn all about these unsung heroes.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And there's Jerry, the weather roll-in. But the three of us together, you've got yourself the weather team of Stuff You Should Know. That's right. This is kind of a fun one that Dave Ruse helped us out with, that you commissioned. You did a great job. Weather people. That's right. Weather casters, broadcast meteorologists. We're talking about not just meteorologists in general. This is a very specific subset of meteorologists.

They're meteorologists who are on TV presenting the weather. TV weather people. Yeah. This is Ken Cook. Oh, I forgot about Ken Cook. Oh my gosh. Dude, he's still around. Really? Yeah. And that's kind of the fun thing that you will see partially in this episode. And if you just are from a city that has local news, which is to say everywhere. Right.

If you get a gig like this and you want to and you don't do anything wrong. Sure. Like the idea from the weather, from the TV station is that they will have you for 30 years if you will stay on. Because that's what they're after. They're after someone that the local audience bonds with. They trust. They know and love. These jobs don't go away unless you're just not any good at it for some reason. But if you lock in, like if you're like a Dallas Raines or a Ken Cook and you lock into your job as the local weather personality, you're set for life as long as you don't screw it up.

Yeah. Which interestingly, like a little corollary to that, Chuck, is that that low turnover makes the jobs really competitive. Oh, sure. I read that TV weather people are not friends with the other channels weather people. Really? Yeah. It's super competitive from what I heard. Which is strange because when you think of the TV weather person, they're like the friendliest, nicest person in the whole group. Yeah. It's like the gang fight in Anchorman in the alley.

Yeah. And as we'll see, Anchorman as hilarious as it was was also incredibly accurate in a lot of ways. Yeah. Absolutely. So we're talking about weather casters, broadcast meteorologists, TV weather personalities. I'm going to give those examples every time. No. And there's a really longstanding joke that says, what other profession could you be wrong half of the time and still get paid a million dollars? Man.

Yeah. Been around a very, very long time. And it kind of underscores just how people typically think of the weather person. They remember when the weather person gets it wrong a lot of times. But weather people are, do you remember we talked about how incredibly stressful a court stenographer's job must be? Mm-hmm. I think the weather person on TV might have a job that's equally stressful to that. You think?

Let's talk about the components of the weather person's job, Chuck. I think it looks like a good gig. And in fact, I wanted for a very brief time, and I've mentioned this before, aspired, not aspired, that's overshooting it, thought briefly in college about trying to be a weather person. I don't. But because I was into meteorology, as I mentioned before, I used to watch the Weather Channel with my best friend, Rad, in high school.

Yeah. While we hung out. And I took a weather and climate course in college, and that further reinforced that I was like, this is really cool. And I was a pre-journalism major. I wanted to be, I thought I wanted to be like a broadcast news kind of reporter type. Right. But I thought no one, and this was, you know, eight and 19 year old Chuck, I was like, nobody's trying to be a weather person these days,

because it's so uncool. Like that would probably be a pretty easy gig to get. Yeah, not true. Like little did I know. Dude, and there's so much work to it too. So first of all, not everyone's a meteorologist, and this is a big bone of contention among the meteorologists who do present on TV. Yeah.

Most of them are now, but not all of them. Yes. But from what I saw by most, that means slightly over 50%. Oh, really? Yeah. It's not like the vast majority from what I've seen. I guess I'm thinking most major cities, but yeah, you're right. I guess.

Sure. Sheboygan doesn't have a meteorologist. I think if you are an actual meteorologist on TV, you command more money and probably a little more respect. Who knows? Of course. But while you're, while you're working, so say you, you're a meteorologist. Okay. So you have to have an understanding of how the weather works.

You have to understand how you can communicate that understanding to the public in an understandable way. So understanding all around. You have to have a, it's a good personality. Like you can't be like me, some, some dark shmo, you know? You have to be nice and people, people want to like you and you, so you got to be likable in return. You also have to have like a lot of poise because you're up there on live TV. Don't forget all of this is live. And one of the things I didn't know about weather people, they don't have a script.

And if you ever watch a weather person deliver their spiel in a couple of minutes, most of the time they do not mess up. They don't have to correct themselves. They don't like, like accidentally say half of a word. Rains to the snow. They're like, they're like the opposite of us, right? They do not screw up. And sometimes they do, of course, but most of the time they don't. They're on YouTube, but that happens.

Yeah. Right. They know what they're talking about, they're getting it across in a logical manner that's spread out in like some understandable way that you can follow that makes sense on live TV while manipulating images on a green screen that they can't see except for monitors on either side while also just being fun and chipper and doing it all within your time limit. That's, I say that that is a high stress, really admirable job. Okay. Here's what I say. Okay. That's your, that's your take.

Okay. My take admirable for sure, high stress for week one. Okay. And then I think you're on cruise control for the next 35 years. Maybe not a week one, but I see what you mean. Sure. And I'm not saying, again, not saying that they're not doing a good job or whatever, but I bet you once they have that down, it's a pretty great job. Sure.

That's not super stressful. All right. That's just my guess. Yeah, no, you won me over to your side. I'm usually, my opinion is almost always correct, but in this case it wasn't. Let's go back in time though to 1870 when a very sort of monumental thing happened in the United States weather wise. It's when the National Weather Service was founded and they from the get go said, here's our mission. We're going to collect data from all over the country from these weather stations.

We're going to send it out on the telegraph and people can put it in newspapers if they want. And that's just what happened starting in the 1880s with New York world. They started putting their own local weather forecast on the front page. And then it took another cheese probably 50 years or so, maybe not quite before a paper would do the national weather and that would of course be the New York Times did a national weather map. Yeah. And so weather's always basically been associated with news like right from the get go. And as news has evolved in the way that news is delivered, the weather's evolved alongside it. So when the news made the jump to radio, weather was right there basically from the outset.

And there was a guy named Jimmy Fidler and he was out of WLBC in Munchie, Indiana. Munchie? Munchie. I think it's Munchie. If it were Italian it'd be Munchie. Oh, I love Munchie. We should go. It is Munchie.

I know that because it's not that far from Toledo. So thank you for correcting me. I don't know about my asthma throat too, if people think I'm dying, I'm not. It's just pollen season. Dude, it is so bad up here. It's crazy. Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah.

3,000s were talking about people. Is that what the level is? It's high. Yes. Yeah, because usually I don't get it too bad, but I've been wheezy and asthmatic for like six weeks. Plus there's also the nice little bonus of it being cold. Super cold. Like February cold here right now.

And it's not like it was cold on one day. It's set in cold. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. And I should also point out that laughing triggers like that asthma wheeze and cough. Well, I'll try not to be funny. I'm not making any promises. I know.

I'm trying to contain my laugh because if not, I'll go. I would find that satisfying. All right. Try and kill me. Okay. So anyway, he was out of WLBC and Munchie in the end and he's known as basically the first weatherman, the guy who created the, what we saw as the weatherman and eventually weather person all the way back in the 1930s.

Yeah. And that's sort of the more personality driven weather reporter. Yeah. As we'll see, you know, well, we can talk about it right now actually, as we'll see if TV, as TV became a thing that sort of came and went over the years until it firmly established itself as like whether people should be probably just a little more personality plus. But he was also the first human to be on the television reporting the weather. TV in the late 1930s and early 40s was not a very big deal only about, and it's hard

to find good numbers, but Dave found a stat that said about 6,000 TV sets nationwide. Man. After the war, that became in less than a decade, close to 10 million TV sets. Crazy. That's when that boom happened. But he, old Jimmy, almost at Filder Fiddler, went on TV in Cincinnati either in 1939 or 1940 as the first human TV weatherman. Yes.

And I'm glad that you caveated that with human because a lot of people are like, oh no, the 1% of all time was Woolly Lamb, a cartoon character, a lamb, if you didn't catch that from the name, who was just a total shill for botany wrinkle proof ties. Botany, I take it, is the same as the Botany 500 company that outfitted guys like Rod Serling and all of them in the 50s. Oh, nice looking suits. So Woolly had a jingle that proceeded every forecast, and I have not heard this, but I guarantee just from reading it, I can recreate it.

You ready? It's hot. It's cold. It's rain. It's fair. Oh, wait. I already screwed it up. Hold on.

Let me try again. All right. One and a two. It's hot. It's cold. It's rain. It's fair. It's all mixed up together.

But I is botany's Woolly lamb predict tomorrow's weather. I think that you nailed it. That's the only way you can do it. 10 out of 10. Thank you. Or what was Star Search? Four and three-quarter stars. Yeah, that's right.

I forgot about that. Woolly lamb, though, was a full year or more after Fiddler. So I don't see why the date is under dispute. So I don't get that. It's probably just an internet thing. Yeah. I don't know if Fiddler was considered a big liar or something because Dave says that there's no archival footage of it.

But if he said that he did it. Well, that's because they didn't record that stuff back then. Exactly. Remember in our sitcoms episode, they didn't start recording until the late 40s, early 50s, maybe. It was just live. Not even live to tape, right? But the fact that he's saying he did it, I don't see why they would be like, no, you're

lying. It was really woolly lamb. Yeah. It was in his obituary. So I'll go with that. But there was one other thing that Jimmy Fiddler did that created the persona of the TV weatherman, in addition to that whole, you know, the personality that you were talking about. He took weather data from all different sorts of places and put it together and interpreted

it in a way that he could then present it to the public who would then know what the weather was going to be like tomorrow or the day after. That was Jimmy Fiddler who created that. That's right. And that set the standard. It did. And woolly lamb kind of set a weird standard too in the post-war years, right? I don't know about this.

What happened? Oh, well, so woolly lamb, so imagine a cartoon lamb as your weather person on your local TV station. I've got. I'm there. Kind of weird. There was a period in the late 40s, early 50s where that would kind of be a fairly normal thing or in addition to cartoon lambs, there were puppets.

Oh, yeah. I get what you mean. Sure. There were other cartoons. There were all the clowns, all sorts of just weird stuff, rhyming guys, like we'll talk about a little bit of that, but woolly lamb and Jimmy Fiddler really set the stage for whether people would come. And I think Chuck, I have just set the stage for our first outbreak.

Well done. The thing that I most know you about is other people's finances. I just want to ask people how much money do you make and what have you figured out about money that the rest of us haven't? I'm Maya Lau and this is Other People's Pockets, the show where I ask people about their money because salary transparency is important and because we can all learn something from other people's financial mistakes and money hacks. On this show, we talk about money in actual dollar amounts.

Like how much does a Hollywood writer make? How does an elite scientist wind up unhoused? What's it like to make it as a big time journalist and then lose practically everything? I talk to my guests about how they were raised, how they deal with their money anxieties, and of course, what's in their bank accounts. So get your pay stubs out. Other People's Pockets is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and Little Everywhere. Listen to Other People's Pockets on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you

get your podcasts. Hey y'all, it's Justin Richmond. And growing up, I was told that college would be my ticket to success. No one in my family had ever completed a degree, so when I transferred to UC Berkeley in 2011, I thought as long as I'd made it through the next two years, I'd made it. Of course, it was really only the beginning. I had no idea what came next, what I wanted to do for a living, or what making a living even meant.

I was lost, so I started doing what I did as a kid whenever I saw a person of color in a fence or a suit. I started asking successful black men and women I'd see around what they did for them. And that's when the idea for this show struck. To start interviewing successful people, people were up on the outside. My new show is called Starter from the Bottom. It's a podcast where I interview people who had to strive and struggle to reach the top. Women, people of color, those who weren't part of the old boys network.

How did they beat the odds? From media firebrands, Charlemagne the God, to personal finance guru Suzy Orman, to heavy weight fighting champion Francis Egano. Hear their stories in their own words. To start it from the bottom on the iHeartRadio app, at the podcast, or wherever you get. What if I told you there was way more to the story behind game changing events? Welcome to my new podcast, that moment with Damon John. Every Tuesday we will jump into the personal stories of some of the most influential people

on the planet, from business moguls. At this point I'm a young chef. I talk to chef, is that listen to me now, as a black kid, you can work in the restaurant. Because people like me allow you to work in the restaurant. Celebrities to athletes and artists. You gotta have a little gang since you're surviving this business because they will also challenge anything they think won't fight back. Greatness starts with a single step.

So whether you're an entrepreneur, an artist, or just someone seeking inspiration, join me every Tuesday for that moment with Damon John on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to get your podcasts. All right, so I mentioned before TVs booming post-war, close to 10 million TV sets in the end of the 1940s, by that time they had about 70 local TV stations, which doesn't sound like a lot compared to today, but obviously your major cities are going to have them, and it took a long time, and we'll talk about when the FCC broke things up and allowed more than one per city as well, a little bit.

But in the 40s, this is where I was talking about sort of personality plus kind of coming and going. There were a couple kinds of weather forecasters on television when it first started really rolling out post-war, and that was the really sort of dry kind. Some of these people were former, they were veterans from the military who knew about the weather from, you know, doing that in the military. Sometimes they were just really stuffy science types, sometimes they were not science people at all, and they were just stuffy, but they were just kind of boring.

But if you, you know, like I said, at the beginning, you could lock into a job even back then and have it through the 1960s and into the 70s, and that happened on a few occasions, right? Yeah, there was a guy, a chief meteorologist at WTOP in Washington, D.C., Lewis Allen, and he was there for many decades, I'm not sure when he retired, but he was around for a very long time. There's people still alive that remember him as their weatherman, right? And he was really well known, he was an incredibly accomplished meteorologist, but he was also

a pretty good little drawer, and so he would draw like what the next day's weather was going to be like, he called it a woodle, a weather doodle. And I've seen from the research, if you have a little thing like that, or a good sign-off or something. Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, talk about endearing the public to you, that's all it takes, a woodle. Yeah, go screw yourself, San Diego. Clint Yule was another one, he became known nationally as Mr. Weather because he became

the first national deliverer of weather in the late 1940s when he debuted on the Camel News Caravan on NBC, Camel Cigarettes of course sponsored that. And he worked out of Chicago, but kind of invented a system that would become the green screen later by putting a map, a Rand McNally map of the United States under plexiglass, and then drawing on it with a race marker. And he would draw like weather fronts and rain and dry weather and stuff like that. He would draw words on it, then it would move to color, he made those color markers. And he was the first sort of national dude to come around.

One little tidbit about Clint Yule, that Rand McNally map, he had to bring it from home. Yeah, it was his. It's hilarious. They didn't cover it. I mentioned the two types of weather people, this was sort of into the 1950s. So I guess those three types, you had your sort of dry types, but in the 50s they really wanted to spice it up, and that's when you got either your wacky men, like you mentioned the rhyming weatherman, that was out of Bill Williams, out of Nashville, or people that

had puppets. Willard Scott was a very famous weatherman his entire career, but had always been pretty wacky and was Bozo the Clown on TV before that and was Ronald McDonald and TV commercials before that. I think the first Ronald McDonald. But you had those wacky types, these weird men trying to inject a little entertainment into the news weather. And then you had what were known then as weather girls, which was, hey, let's get an attractive

young woman, let's put her in a nice fashionable outfit. Who cares if she knows meteorology, let's just put her on our TV screen. Yeah, and the first weather girl was Carol Reed at WCBS in New York. And they brought her on to go head to head with the weatherman Tex Antoine at WNBC. And the reason why was because it's like you said, the FCC opened up competition in 1952 for TV licenses. So that's where we got more than one local TV station. So all of a sudden there was that competition and they figured out, well, people don't really

take the weather all that seriously, it's not like crime or something like that. Let's use that to kind of gain viewers by just being a little wacky. So Tex Antoine, he had a cartoon named Uncle Webby. And he would blame Uncle Webby, the weather bureau, if he got it wrong, it was Uncle Webby's fault. And it was kind of like a gruff side chick. And he was extraordinarily popular. So they brought Carol Reed on as an attractive 26 year old who didn't have any training in

meteorology, right? But she was very likable. She had a good smile and she had a good sign off, Chuck. I'm going to give it to you. You can't not take this. Have a happy. Have a happy. That's very nice.

Yeah. So she kicked off the whole weather girls thing. Oh yeah. There was another one named Ginger Stanley. She would sometimes get in her bathing suit and get in a tank of water on the CBS morning show to deliver the weather. Another one, and this is hard to believe, they had in lingerie in bed. Yeah.

In 1952. I know. Which I imagine the lingerie then was just some head to toe. Yeah, head to toe, you know, gown that just looked sort of silky to the touch would be my guess. Sure. And then you had the fact that it was a legit entree point, though, if you wanted to do serious news.

So you would just get in however you could, like Diane Sawyer was one of these quote unquote weather girls in Louisville, right, and they said, take those glasses off, Han. Yeah, men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. He looked too smart. And Raquel Welch was, in fact, in San Diego, and she was the sun up weather girl. Fact of the podcast, Raquel Welch at the time was known as Raquel Tejada. Yeah, which means lime tree. Oh, does it?

Yeah, Raquel lime tree. That's also, Raquel means squeeze. And Welch means grape juice. Wow. I'm all, I'm starting to see the pattern now. I think in 1961 was sort of the apex of the weather girl phenomenon when they had 466 TV stations nationwide and about three quarters of them were using weather girls. And that's generally not the case anymore when you see a woman that is the local meteorologist.

And at least in the big city, chances are she has her meteorology degree and is certified as well. It's definitely not a novelty or like they're using sex appeal to like get people to watch the weather. That's not what they're ostensibly doing any longer. But what I found interesting was that Taro Reed, who started the weather girl era, also ended it when she was let go in 1964, I believe. That's considered the end of the weather girl era too.

And the reason that the weather girl era came to an end is because the pendulum, which had started with stuffy academics and then swung to women in lingerie and bed giving the weather was started to swing back the other way where the actual like legitimate meteorologists are like, Hey, what we're doing is actually kind of important and it's not as easy as you guys think. So we want a little more respect. And so to help kind of give them respect, the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association started coming up with certifications and seal of approval,

seals of approval that like a legit meteorologist on TV who is doing good work could get and basically uses like a bonafide. Yeah. Like why did I go to college and study this and work on training my hair part for the past 15 years and put all this money into hairspray if I can't get on TV because there's a lady in our lingerie in bed. You know, I'm in the process of training my hairdresser, Michael. Oh, retraining it?

To something else. Yeah, he thought it was over way too close to my ear, so he's moving it a little closer toward the crown of my head. Very interesting. It is interesting. And it's actually kind of a rough transition period because my hair wants to go back down but it's got to go back up this way and it doesn't always want to do that. I constantly run my fingers through my stupid hair.

It's awful and by doing that because it's been cold lately, it creates a lot of static so it just ends up like stuck to my forehead in one large mass and I end up with a helmet head ironically looking like a 1970s weather person. My hair, I've been getting it cut on the sides and in the back and I've been doing all kinds of crazy hair stuff since the pandemic, but what I realize is I think what I'm subconsciously going for is the haircut I had in high school was when I had the long, all-one-length bangs skater cut and kind of shaved up on the sides and in the back. I'm getting there.

I can't quite envision that. I'll send you a picture. I'll say you with bangs for real? Not bangs like combed straight down on my forehead. So now like Anthony Ketis' current haircut kind of thing. No, no, no, no, no. I'm swooping it up and over like always but it's just sort of that all-one-length sort of thing.

I'm still having trouble. I'll see you on tour soon. Okay, good. Then we can talk about each other's hair in the green room. Okay, so let's move on beyond our hair, right? Because we're coming to another pivotal watershed moment in TV weather people history. Yeah, we're coming to the Anchorman years. This was, like you said, that movie was true in a lot of ways and in the 1960s, sort of

the late 60s, WABC in New York said, all right, the news had always been sort of a serious affair. Like when you think of national news, you think of like the Walter Cronkites and stuff like that. It wasn't like the news as we know it today, even locally. And WABC in New York said, you know what, let's transform our newscast and have a little more fun with it. It was called Happy Talk or Happy News and we'll have this news team.

We'll have two very personable anchors, like everyone's got to be personality plus now. Everyone's got to kind of joke around as you go to commercial or maybe the weatherman even or the sports person interjects from, you know, the side when they're talking a news story. Obviously not, you know, if it's like a really serious story, they don't come in and joke. But if it's the cat stuck in the tree and the little old lady who scaled it to get it down, everybody in the newsroom is now this one big fun group laughing and joking about it.

Right. And the goal is to make the viewer think that they're watching like a group of friends who hang out like off hours and stuff like that too. Right. Yeah. Like Anchorman. Exactly. Right.

Like that was the thing. Like in Anchorman, they actually did that and they were pair. I didn't realize it, but they were parody parodying Happy Talk, Happy News. And there was a news manager specifically named Al Primo who was brought into WABC to get ratings up. Who's credit was coming up with that format and within a decade, every single TV station still today has the Happy Talk format. So the weather person factors into this because Chuck, they had to have their own personality

and they went back to basically Jimmy Fiddler's personality and adopted that permanently as this happy peppy sciencey type. In fact, a lot of weather people, especially like local stations and smaller markets are called upon to basically explain science stuff sometimes like they're just the in-house egghead basically. Right. Yeah. I mean, they're the only person on staff of the science degree probably.

Right. So there was one thing that really kind of also happened from the Happy Talk format aside from it just existing. Tex Antoine who I mentioned, he was brought on to WNBC in the 50s and gave everybody else a run for their money, he got canceled long before anybody ever even thought of the word canceled but he as part of his Happy Talk spiel, he would often like make funny comments on news stories and I think it became so ingrained in his his pattern that he didn't always stop and think what he was saying and this is definitely a case of that.

Yeah. So he got fired kind of immediately, I think. Yeah, from what I saw for sure and there were a lot of people stepped up to try to bring him back or whatever. They were like, nope, that was definitely over the line. All right. Should we take a break? Yes.

All right. Let's take a break and we will talk about, well, let's talk more about weather people right after this. The thing that I most know you about is other people's finances. I just want to ask people how much money do you make and what have you figured out about money that the rest of us haven't? I'm Maya Lau and this is Other People's Pockets, the show where I ask people about their money because salary transparency is important and because we can all learn something from other

people's financial mistakes and money hacks. On this show, we talk about money in actual dollar amounts. Like how much does a Hollywood writer make? How does an elite scientist wind up unhoused? What's it like to make it as a big time journalist and then lose practically everything? I talked to my guests about how they were raised, how they deal with their money anxieties and of course, what's in their bank accounts, so get your pay stubs out. Other People's Pockets is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and Little Everywhere.

Listen to Other People's Pockets on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey y'all, it's Justin Richmond and growing up, I was told that college would be my ticket to success. No one in my family had ever completed a degree, so when I transferred to UC Berkeley in 2011, I thought as long as I'd made it through the next two years, I'd made it. Of course, it was really only the beginning. I had no idea what came next, what I wanted to do for a living or what making a living

even meant. I was lost, so I started doing what I did as a kid whenever I saw a person of color in a fence or a suit. I started asking successful black men and women I'd see around what they did for them. And that's when the idea for this show struck, to start interviewing successful people who grew up on the outside. My new show is called Starter from the Bottom. It's a podcast where I interview people who had to strive and struggle to reach the top.

Women, people of color, those who weren't part of the old boys network. How did they beat the odds? From media fire brand Charlamagne the God, to personal finance guru Suzy Orman, to heavy weight fighting champion Francis Igano. Hear their stories in their own words. I'm going to start it from the bottom on the iHeart Radio app, at the podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you there was way more to the story behind game changing events?

Welcome to my new podcast, That Moment with Damon John. Every Tuesday we will jump into the personal stories of some of the most influential people on the planet, from business moguls. At this point, I'm a young chef. I talk to chef, he said, listen to me now, as a black kid, you can work in the restaurant, because people like me allow you to work in the restaurant. Celebrities to athletes and artists. You got to have a little gang since you're surviving this business, because they will

also challenge anything they think won't fight back. Greatness starts with a single step. So whether you're an entrepreneur, an artist, or just someone seeking inspiration, join me every Tuesday for That Moment with Damon John on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, so one thing that we've kind of been tracking here is this kind of evolutionless progression of delivering the weather on TV. And one of the big technological advances was the launch of the GOES-1 geostationary

satellite over the US back in 1975, because now we had serious AV that the weather people didn't have before. You could string together these pictures taken every half hour of cloud formations and basically do a flip book on TV and show people the clouds moving across the United States. And if you watch today that the cloud movement that just keeps resetting over and over again during this one specific part of the weathercast, that is the exact same thing. It's probably not coming from GOES-1 anymore, it might be, but it's definitely in the legacy of the GOES-1 satellite.

Oh yeah, and if you're watching the news in the mid-70s, and all of a sudden you see a front literally moving for the first time, like you're pretty knocked out. It was a big deal. People really loved it. The green screen comes along in the 80s. That's what you mentioned earlier when you are standing in front of a green screen. Maybe we should do like a short stuff on Chromakey technology. All right, we should do it in front of a green screen.

We should. We've done stuff in front of green screens before. Oh yeah, lots. That's true. But yeah, they're standing there. They're looking off screen at monitors. They're pointing, it takes a little time to learn how to master pointing at a blank screen and lining it up correctly so you're pointing at Kansas City and not Ames, Iowa by accident.

Doppler comes along as sort of the next big thing or next rad, next generation radar. That was in the early 90s and another big game changer as far as just more in depth and detailed weather forecasting and also how to broadcast it for people's eyeballs. Right. Yeah, because you could see into the storm now. You could talk about the precipitation like inside the storm. It was really, I mean, next generation. Next gen, aptly titled.

So then we get to the big question, which a lot of people may wonder is like, do these people, I know they have meteorology degrees, but a lot of times do, but do they come up with their own forecast or do they just get a printout of the national weather forecast and read it on the air and move their hands around a screen? And it's a little bit of both. Sure they get all of their weather basically data-wise from the National Weather Service and from the NOAA, why not? That's where it all lives.

That's where you're going to get the most accurate stuff. They're not going to be stubborn and be like, well, I don't want to use this stuff. They all use it, but they are like generally people that have lived in this place for a while or after the gain experience, they also gain weather experience and you might hear a local person say like, this front is coming through, but as we've seen before in Atlanta, like in eight years ago when we had this happen, when we thought that was going to happen, like their experience and their sort of color commentary is their own and it very much comes into play and is relevant.

My understanding too is that they're taking this data from the Weather Service and NOAA that they provide and having to interpret it themselves, analyze it, interpret it and then I guess broadcast it in an understandable way, right? So it's not like the Weather Service or NOAA just sends out like, hey, here's Format A, if you want to be spicy today, here's one that's a little edgy. It's nothing like that. It's not written for broadcast now. Right.

So even if you don't have a meteorological degree, you have to understand how to read and interpret that kind of data and I don't think it's so arcane that like the Sigma characters used repeatedly or anything like that. I think you can make heads or tails of it because it's free and open to the public, right? It's available to everybody but there's no purpose in not using that information. That's what everybody does. That's what they've been doing since 1870 and it's one of those if it ain't broke, don't

fix it. Yeah. And at the same time, there's a lot of work that they have to put into putting the puzzle pieces together and giving a clear picture. Absolutely. If you're doing the morning news, you are showing up to work at like 3.34 in the morning depending on what time your first broadcast is. Yeah.

Some of those first local news broadcasts are 4.35 a.m. and they got to be there and know what's going on and look fresh and be ready to go get those morning eye bags calmed down. Right. And speaking of that, Chuck, a lot of most of them do their own hair and makeup unless you're in a really big city. Oh, really? Yeah.

Was there a poll? No, actually I read, I should probably shout it out. I read a post from TropicalWeather.net. Could not for the life of me find out who wrote that, but they were clearly like a former TV weather caster and they talked about, you know, day in the life of a weather caster and one of the things was like they're like a one person show. Like they do almost all their own stuff unless they're in a really large market. Yeah.

I mean, if you're in a small market, you don't have a weather team of like five or six people putting all this stuff together for you. You're like, you know how to work the software, the graphic software. You're like you said, you're doing it on your own. Basically, if you're in a bigger city, then you're going to have like your weather team and stuff like that. And especially if you get to the tippy top of like a Dallas Reigns, I mentioned him a couple of times.

He's the LA guy forever. He may still be for all I know. What about storm fields? Yeah, like if you're sort of a weather celebrity in a big market, then I'm sure that you've got hair and makeup and you've got people putting together all your stuff for you generally. But you know, otherwise you're kind of in the trenches doing the hard work. You probably don't go onto the field as much if you're in a big city. But if you're the small market person, you're probably still the one that's standing out

in the rain at times during a big storm. Yeah. One of the other things too is when you get this picture of the weather together, it's like four in the morning, you have to brief the news manager on whether any of the weather warrants any news coverage, which I hadn't thought about. But that's totally true. I mean, sometimes the weather makes the news and that's from coordinating with the news manager and the weather caster.

You mean like additional, like it's a news story? Yes. Yeah, yeah. And so in addition to just all of the weather stuff, there's a lot of things that weather casters cover that we don't really have anything to do with the weather, but we still expect the weather caster to give it to us. Celestial events, pollen counts, fishing forecasts, all sorts of that stuff. If you think about it, not really part of the weather and in fact that tropicalweather.net

really dryly put it that the public relates astrological events to weather, considering that it is viewed in the sky. Yeah. That's about it. It's kind of true. We all kind of think of that as weather, but it's really not a lot to do with weather. But the weather people have to look that up too. They have to research local events to put the weather in context.

Like is the big May Day Parade going to get rained out, like that kind of thing. So it digs the weather and makes it personal and important to you by saying like this thing you're going to may or may not get rained out. And the weather person has to know all of that stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. When they're not in the studio and doing weather stuff, they're usually pretty active in the community.

You're not going to find like a local TV weather person that's just like a shut in off hours and doesn't get involved. I think they're very much expected and it's good for their brand, obviously, to get out in the community, to be the guest judge at the chicken wing fling, which by the way I'm doing coming up soon. Oh, really? In Atlanta. I'm a celebrity judge for the Kirkwood wing fling.

Wow. In May. Best of luck. So if anyone wants to come down there and heckle me, feel free. Visit elementary schools and go talk about weather stuff there. And like I said, you're your own brand, so it will behoove you to build your brand and you do that through social media. So chances are you got a big or hopefully a big Instagram following or you're on Twitter

or whatever. Like, you know, it's just like any other on air personality. You want your name to be out there. Okay. So you got up and got to work at 330. You took all of the tea leaves from the National Weather Service in NOAA, put them together into a picture that you can share with people. You've made literal pictures of this stuff as graphics.

You probably in between the morning news and say the new news, if you're doing both of those, you taped a broadcast for the website. You had to tweet the whole time to try to build your social media following. And then after work, you had to go to an elementary school to give a talk about weather and then go home, eat, go to bed and then get up the next morning at, I don't know, 2.45 or 3. That's the life of a weather person. No, you go to the local fern bar. Okay.

Yeah, that's true. That's probably, you could fit that in there somewhere. You could fit a Harvey wall banger or two in. Yeah, that's what you do in the 70s. But yeah, it's a tough job. I mean, you lost me at 2.45 in the morning. No doubt. And then also there's, I mean, unless you're at the top of the heap, they're going to tell

you, you need to work on the 4th of July on Christmas on Thanksgiving, like, and I saw one of the ways, again, from tropicalweather.net, if you want to get your foot in the door, basically say, I will be the guy that works on Christmas and Thanksgiving and just give me on TV, let me show everybody what I've got. I got 5,000 followers on Twitter. Give me a shot. Give me a shot. Not afraid to stand in front of a tornado.

Right. That's another one too. I mean, standing in storms is like you said. It's a real hazard of the job, but they kind of, depending on who you are, you kind of have to do it. Yeah. And that's become more of a thing, I think, in the last like 20 years or so. Like, I remember watching the Weather Channel in the 80s and I don't remember seeing a ton

of that. But people watch the Weather Channel now to see what's the guy's name, Jim? Cantori. Yeah, Jim Cantori. Lovely. You know, is this the one where he's going to be swept out to sea or not? Yeah. The one Dave linked to a clip of Hurricane Ian and Jim Cantori in it hanging onto like

a street sign. Yeah. And behind him is like a stop sign that's been bent at the base and it's just flipping back and forth. And if that thing swung, it would chop Jim Cantori right in half. Yeah. Like those things are heavy and they can be sharp at high speeds. So it is definitely dangerous, but you said that it was from the maybe the 90s or something

that they started going out in the weather. Apparently Dan Reathers credited it as one of the first reporters to go out in a hurricane, Hurricane Carla in 1961 when he was just a little cub reporter at KHOU in Houston. And he went out and showed what it was like out in the hurricane and kind of set that trend that I guess, I think you're right. It wasn't something that you would see until later on after the Weather Channel really kind of got into it. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like it became a little more like the storm chasey thing kind of called a little more. Weather Channel. Thanks to Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. Which is funny. I know I've said this before, but Emily loves Twister and it is just so not her thing. And my joke that I've used over and over over the years when people talk about Emily's taste in movies is Emily likes two types of movies, small indie dramas and Twister.

Liking Twister is so high-oh though. It is so high-oh now that I think about it and she was obsessed with tornadoes growing up because of so high-oh. For sure. But yeah, the Weather Channel came around in 82, so I never really thought about it. When I was watching it in like 88, it was still pretty new. John Coleman was the brainchild behind it. He got to start in the 70s and eventually was the weather person for Good Morning America.

And he was one of the ones that was like, you know, people want to watch people. They don't tune in for the weather. They tune in to watch the weather person, which is sort of true and sort of not. Yeah. I guess it depends on the weather person really if you think about it. But they also want to hear the weather. Right. Although, you know, I have something to confess.

I have trouble paying attention and focusing sometimes. I don't think in the history of my entire life I've ever absorbed a weather report ever. Really? I'll watch the whole thing and at the end I'll be like, I have no idea what the weather is going to be tomorrow, every single time. I haven't watched a weather report in a long time. I watch local and national news almost every night.

So it happens almost every day. That's yeah. I haven't watched local news since in probably 20 something years. Oh, you're missing out, buddy. No, I'm not into it. I don't turn on the TV before 8 p.m. I don't know. I don't know.

Well, except for Jeopardy. Okay. That's 7.30. Yeah. Still. I don't want to watch TV at 8. Usually until 9. Does it really?

There's that hour of power where you just sit in there meditating? No, that's when bedtime for Ruby happens. So you can't have a screen on because she'll just be like, must watch. I don't care. I want to watch how the equalizer ends tonight. Oh, dude. She'll watch. She was watching these stupid ads on the gas pump the other day from the car.

Oh my God. I was like, this is sick. Yeah. That's a problem, Chuck. on you didn't say. She said screw you dad. So well there's your other problem too. That and Emily Loving Twister you got a lot of problems. That's right but you know what's not one? The weather. Because I use my weather apps, that's how I ingest the weather. I guess I'm like a Gen Z because they've done research,

Pew Research even, the best research. And they found that 42% of people over 65 still follow the local news very closely. And 51% of that group of people get their local news from local TV broadcasts. If you go to under 30, it drops down to 15% follow the local news very closely. And 26% prefer to get their news from TV. Right so 60% of that group like get it from online. Yeah I mean I want to see who that 15% of 20 somethings is following the local news very closely on television. I think it's like a retro kind of thing. They also write letters by hand and stuff like that. Maybe that's it. That's my guess. So you could make a pretty good point that the TV weather caster is like you know a walking dinosaur. They're doomed right?

The thing is no you're right. The thing is is if the Pew also did another poll where they asked people like what's the most important part of a local newscast and everybody 70% of people said the weather. Yeah. It topped crime. Sports was second to last just above restaurants, clubs, and bars. Which I found really surprising because they treat the sports department like they're just gods or something. Yeah. So the weather person as long as there's local news there's going to be weather people because they're the bright shining star of the whole thing as far as the viewing public goes even if they're not particularly portrayed or treated that way. Although it feels like in recent years like they've started to really kind of spotlight the weather person a

little more and how smart they are and reliable and how great their family thinks they are that kind of thing. Yeah. And you know I bet they had the same fears just about local news period once national news became a thing on TV. Yeah. And it'll always be around because people I just think people like I like that it's still on. I don't watch it but I love that. I mean the TV was on in a in a restaurant I was at the night and that's where I saw Ken Cook was still around. Yeah. Cool. He's like wow look at him still going. Yeah. And Jeff Hollinger used to be the sports guy. I think he's an anchor now. But that's the thing. I mean like you you can not you know participate or take part in something and still be bummed if it isn't around anymore. I agree.

You know. Yeah. So there's another kind of route that some weather casters are taking to wrap all this up and that is to basically interpret the weather as far as like climate change goes. Yeah. And Dave put it really perfectly that they're they're evolving into basically a science reporter who doesn't just forecast the weather but puts it into context particularly these days in the context of climate change. Yeah. And that's a that's a pretty good new direction for them to go in. It makes a lot of sense and talk about making yourself relevant. Yeah. Well I mean depending on what city you live in that's probably welcome or not welcome. I did see John Coleman. I was looking trying to find clips of him on YouTube and there was one

I couldn't find out what year it was but one where they he did a full segment poopooing climate change basically in the data. Oh yeah. Yeah. I thought it was pretty interesting. The guy who founded the weather channel. Yeah. Okay. Oh man. That reminds me there's a book called Merchants of Doubt. I think I've talked about before and it's like it's really unnerving. It's about stuff like that. It's about people who I'm not accusing John Coleman of this but it's about scientists who are basically paid by huge companies to to sow doubt among the public about whether the science mind things like climate change or tobacco causing cancer was actually legitimate or not and really set the world back in all sorts of really evil ways. It's really tough

to read. Hmm. Sounds fun. Yeah. Really. That was a weird way to end this episode but that's how we're going to end it. Yeah. I got nothing else. All right. Well since Chuck said he's got nothing else everybody that means it's time for Listener Mail. This is about Dolly Parton. We had a fun recent episode on Dolly. Yeah. Her Majesty and this is from John Pizaric who lives in Japan. Hey guys. Wanted to chime in with a fun Dolly Parton fact to just show how she has become incorporated in all sorts of cultures. I've included a picture for reference but in dental school when you learn to do fillings we use a thin metal band to help shape the fillings for the tooth. However sometimes the filling would be particularly deep or large and instead of using

the standard type one band you would need to use a type two band to help students remember what the type two band looks like. They were affectionately known as the Dolly Parton band because of the bust like appearance she became famous for and he's showing me these little bands and one one just looks like a sort of a bent popsicle stick like a boomerang shaped popsicle stick and one looks like a boomerang popsicle stick with boobs where the boomerang meets in the center. Yeah. Okay. Let's check that out. So that must be what he's talking about. I know Chuck has had his fair share of dental experience but almost guaranteed that most dentists know the reference if you were to bring this up. I'm going to do that John just so you know. Thank you for all you do.

I wish my trip to DC from Japan was able to coincide with your show but at last it's not the case. So sorry John. Yeah. Sorry about that John. Well thanks for a great email though. We appreciate that. We always love learning new weird things and that was a new weird thing for us right Chuck. New for me. If you want to get in touch with us like John did send us an email send it off to Stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. America loves its founding fathers but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. I'm Bob Crawford. Join me Patrick Warburton and Nick Offerman as we bring

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