About Me
The weather has fascinated me since I was 7 years old when my 2nd grade class voted me to be the class weatherman. The project required me to pay attention to the weather every day, and I have never stopped.
I have since expanded my understanding of what makes the weather happen by getting a degree in applied physics from Brigham Young University with a minor in broadcasting. While at BYU, I was the weatherman on ElevenNews which was broadcast to the entire state of Utah (and parts of Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming) on the Salt Lake PBS station.
After graduating, I moved to Wausau, Wisconsin where I worked as a weatherman for the ABC affiliate WAOW as part of the Stormtrack 9 Weather team. In the end, I decided it wasn't the right career for me and my family but it was an experience that I'll never forget and that I will always be glad that I did. I still regularly use the skills than I learned as a weatherman and I still enjoy a good midwest thunderstorm.
Videos of Me
When people find out that I was a weatherman, they often ask if there are videos of me giving the forecast. Here are some of them.
Resume Reel
This first video is what's called a resume reel. It's what you send to news directors to try to get a job. You have just a few seconds to make a good first impression because they get so many which is why it starts with a montage before it gets to some actually complete weather segments. Since this was before I got my job in Wausau, these are all from when I was volunteering for the PBS station in Salt Lake as a student.
Live Outside
Being outside was one of my favorite things, especially once I got to Wausau and that meant being the man on the street. Usually when there was going to be a big storm that would affect the morning commute, I would get asked to go be out it in. I would usually bring along a box of weather instruments so that I could use them as part of explaining what was going on.
Inversions
Here's a video of me explaining what an inversion is as part of the forecast. This was while I was working at WAOW in Wausau. Inversions aren't all that common in the Midwest but they are very common in Utah during the winter so I felt very confident explaining what it is.
Tour Time
When I started regularly doing the 11 am newscast, I would often pick a camera from our national weather camera network to look at the weather somewhere else. The news anchor and I would often try to pick some place relevant to the news that day. After we did this a few times, our news director decided to make it a formal segment we called "Tour Time".
Sweeps Package
Television stations have their viewers formally tracked four times a year during what is known as "sweeps." For local news teams, this is when they try to show their investigative reports that aren't time sensitive so that they can boost their viewership numbers. These also tend to be a little bit longer stories that are advertised in advance. Because the weather is something that people in central Wisconsin care a lot about, my news director asked me to do a sweep package for sweeps in late 2014.