Tom Skilling’s career mirrors evolution of television meteorology

CHICAGO — In nearly a half a century of television meteorology, Tom Skilling has seen technology evolve from grease pencils to computer graphics, and from snow sticks to satellites. Through it all there’s been one constant – the human element.  Skilling said the profession that has evolved from the early days of TV, when it was a gimmicky role of comic relief during serious newscasts to a data-driven position of trust, a voice of authority on topics from travel conditions to public safety.

“You know, when I started,” Skilling said, “We didn’t have satellite pictures. We didn’t have doppler radar. We didn’t have computer models.”

The very first TV weather forecasters in the late 1940s and early 1950s were not necessarily even scientists.

“You had people who were ‘rip-and-reading’ the weather,” he said. “They didn’t really have any weather background.”

On some of WGN’s first newscasts, the weather report was delivered by actor Ned Locke – who also played ‘Ringmaster Ned’ on Bozo’s Circus.

The profession was still trying to find the right balance between science and showbiz.

More: The wizard of weather: A peek behind the curtain as Tom Skilling tracks a storm

“You know, weather shows in the early days — before we were able to visualize the weather with satellite imagery and radar and really show what was going on — were full of gimmicks,” Skilling said.

Skilling himself did the weather with a puppet named ‘Albert the Alley Cat’ at Milwaukee TV station WITI in the mid-1970s.

“I think what led to the transition was they liked the fact that whoever was doing the weather had enough scientific acumen,” Skilling said.

Skilling honed that acumen at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. Madison was the birthplace of satellite meteorology. Skilling and his classmate Louis Uccellini, who would become the director of the National Weather Service, recently they returned to campus and reminisced about the early days of forecasting.

“We worked the maps collected the maps and then hung them up on a wall like this,” Uccellini said as he pointed to cork board walls in a windowless room on UW’s Madison campus. “We came in here and we actually worked the plotting of the data the analysis of the data, upper air data … cross sections. And this is the way you started seeing the atmosphere doing everything by hand it was absolutely incredible.”

TV producers searched for better ways to gather information – and explain it by “showing” the weather in action.

Skilling started out with a few basic graphics such as a weather wall that would be hand drawn or painted, and a paper map that would be plotted.

“We hand plotted everything, and I look back on that era and I think, how in the world did those who came before me do what they did – and how did we do it in the early years,” Skilling said.

Skilling combined the skills of a scientist and with the vision of artist – creating hand drawn maps that would become the graphics we see on TV and in the newspaper– hundreds of his original sketches still exist in the WGN Weather department.

Photos: Tom Skilling’s career

“So here is the famous drawer,” said Mike Janssen, a WGN meteorologist, pointing out the file cabinet where Skilling’s sketches are kept. “These became very famous because this would be something he would draw, hand to the art folks and then when somebody got the Tribune the next day, this is what they would have – a Tom Skilling drawing that he had come up with.”

The data he was drawing initially came from a battery powered package of instruments called a radiosonde.  Attached to a weather balloon, it would measure and transmit temperature, humidity, air pressure, and wind speeds.

“We would go on the air in the early stages of my career, and they launched the weather balloons at 7 in the morning and 7 at night Chicago time. And we’d start getting the first pieces of information, but we wouldn’t be able to totally process it,” Skilling said.

Soon doppler radar was widely used by meteorologists to examine the velocity and motion of precipitation.

“We had radar systems we never had that can see snow. We couldn’t see snow at one time,” he said.

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In the 1980s, technology was changing at a rapid pace.  Meteorologists started presenting the weather in front of a big green screen called a “chroma key” which allows a filter to replace anything green with images and graphics, like weather maps. In an interview in the late 1990s, Skilling recalled the technological revolution that transformed his job.

“I’ve been with WGN about 20 years and literally there’s not a function I perform every day in putting the weather show together that hasn’t totally changed,” he said.

But by the early 1990s, Skilling focused more on using equations and computer displays – one of the first meteorologists in the country to do so, showing the atmosphere in motion.

“It dawned on meteorologists early in the last century that we could probably write equations that describe the way the atmosphere would unfold,” he said.

In the 1990s, skilling and Emmy winning weather producer Bill Snyder would still analyze hundreds of pages of data from the National Weather Service that would come in via a fax machine.

“For years you got stacks of alphanumeric data, printed data,” he said. “Meteorology is a profession where you work with a lot of data. It’s real-time, it’s got to be.”

Now, Skilling is the undisputed master of the numerical forecast – one that produces a spectrum of probable outcomes — allowing him to zero in on the most likely scenarios for long-range and short-range forecasts.

“Little could they have imagined back in that era (early last century) that we’d have machines that would do quadrillion operations per second, which is the kind of thing that we run today,” Skilling said.

Today weather services produce models using computers, with data from radar technology, satellite databases, and measured natural elements.  “We even get German and Korean models now,” he said. “It’s wise to look at every solution you can get to get an idea of the whole range of possible ways that the weather’s going to unfold, thereby you generate a more accurate product.”

He synthesizes all of the information in a process called “esnembling.”

Today, WGN has thermometers scattered across the region, giving instant and accurate temperature measurements at pinpoint locations. WGN also taps into its own network of cameras – and the WeatherBug network — that show the real-time conditions across the area.  These images — combined with radar — help the trained expert see what the computer can’t, underscoring the human aspect of forecasting.

“What part of the thunderstorm produces the tornado?” Skilling asked. “You look at your radar, you see it coming into an area and you say, ‘hey, folks in this area are at risk of being affected adversely by the storm that’s developing.’”

And you can see the 1997 documentary on how Tom Skilling produced the Tribune Weather page in the player below.

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