Part of SUNY Oswego alumni’s bragging rights resides in having conquered the (sometimes) inclement weather, particularly the snowy, cold winters, on campus. But the dramatic weather and lakefront campus also make the college the perfect place for students to learn in a world-class meteor­ology program. Plus, nothing brings a campus together like being snowed in or blown around by the (occasional) stiff wind off the lake. What follows are a few stories about severe weather and the faculty and alumni who forecast and cover them.

When hundreds of seasoned and aspiring meteorologists submitted applications to compete in a reality television show featuring hilarious weather-related challenges, a SUNY Oswego alumna was among the 12 finalists chosen.

Christina Faraone ’11 of Walden, N.Y., was selected to join the latest charge in the reality TV movement as a contestant on “America’s Next Weatherman.” TBS teamed up with comedy website Funny or Die for the new series, produced by Mark Burnett and United Artists Media Group.

The grand prize: $100,000, an agent and an appearance forecasting the weather on CNN.

Contenders sparred through assignments about weather knowledge, while the show’s producers devised odd situations and weather-inspired snafus for them to navigate. Faraone, a marine meteor­ologist for the FleetWeather Group, made it to the Final Four before she was eliminated on Sept. 19.

“The most rewarding thing about doing the show was all the new friends I made along the way,” Faraone said. “I still keep in touch with the other contestants.”

The cast of “America’s Next Weatherman” included Christina Faraone ’11, second from right.

Faraone, whose most memorable moments on the show included dressing up as Tornado Terri to teach kids about tornadoes and creating a rap song about the weather, said the show was a fun way to teach others about meteorology—a passion she nurtured as a student at SUNY Oswego.

“SUNY Oswego is, in my opinion, the best place to get a meteorology degree,” Faraone said. “The professors are wonderful.”

Faraone, who just earned her Federal Aviation Administration Aircraft Dispatcher Certification, returns to campus once a year to attend the student-run Great Lakes Atmospheric Science Symposium. She will continue pursuing a career in aviation meteorology.

—Eileen Crandall

Read about other Oswego Alumni Meteorologists.

In the beginning, there was a single teletype machine spitting out National Weather Service reports in SUNY Oswego’s Piez Hall.

Read more from Shapiro and other alumni meteorologists in Wicked Weather: Meteorology Alumni Recall Oswego Weather.

Shapiro, who was among the first to graduate with a SUNY Oswego meteorology degree, recalls the first students of the program trudging around taking snow depth measurements, in an era of limited ability to gauge the current regional weather status—never mind forecast it.

“One time, I was on the phone with the National Weather Service out of Syracuse,” Shapiro said. “They had no idea Oswego was getting pounded with snow.”

This was before modern geostationary weather satellites even existed, Shapiro explained. The available data wasn’t sophisticated enough for them to see what was happening some 35 miles away.

Now, more than 40 years later, times—and technology—have changed. The presence of state-of-the-art equipment, with huge advances in the accumulation of knowledge, has set the science of meteorology on a path of rapid growth. And from the days of a few program pioneers, to today with an enrollment of 90, SUNY Oswego students are at the forefront of the field, as part of one of the largest undergraduate meteorology programs in New York and one that attracts students from throughout the Northeast.

The Influence of a Great Lake

From left are meteorology majors Lauren Cutler ’17, North Canton, Ohio; Alec Zuch ’17, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; Lucy Bergemann ’17, Westwood, Mass.; and Christina Reis ’16, Buffalo, N.Y. They practice creating a weather forecast in the Shineman Center’s Meteorology Broadcasting Lab.

The SUNY Oswego Atmospheric and Geologic Sciences program, home of the meteorology students, is no longer housed in Piez Hall, which was replaced in 2013 with the $118 million Richard S. Shineman Center for Science, Engineering and Innovation. The program now boasts multiple observation decks, national funding, research credentials and modern equipment.

According to Dr. Alfred Stamm, who joined the department in 1977, today’s students have access to high-powered computers and current data designed for forecast modeling and weather prediction. There’s a new wind tunnel simulation area to test wind instruments and simulate flow around objects. There are two towers with weather instruments to keep track
of and archive current weather: wind, temperature, humidity, visibility, precipitation and solar radiation.

There are also instruments to measure cloud heights and wind from 50 to 400 meters above the Earth’s surface.

“We can find temperature, humidity pressure and wind with our radiosonde system, which carries sensors aloft using balloons,” Dr. Stamm said. “The sensors get the wind using global positioning software and all of the data is transmitted to our ground station. We can also measure weather parameters with a tethered balloon.Via the Internet, we get data from around the world and predictions from many different models worldwide.”

In other words, it’s come a long way since the teletype machine.

But there’s another fundamental factor that has been present as a backdrop to these astounding developments in meteorologic technology: Lake Ontario. For all students, past and present, it has been a bonding force in

their experiences at SUNY Oswego, and it’s been drawing aspiring weather students since the inception of a meteorology major in 1971.

According to Dr. Stamm, a campus perched on the eastern edge of the Great Lakes System—with its capability of churning up powerhouse snow storms and waterspouts—gets the blood pumping in the meteorology department and propels students on to careers, including broadcast meteorology worldwide and a wide range of positions with the National Weather Service.

“Storms come from the west, off the lake,” Dr. Stamm said. “It gives us lots of

snow, lightning and waterspouts, which is exciting weather to observe.”

And today’s students couldn’t agree more.

“I grew to love lake-effect snow back home in Buffalo, and Oswego’s proximity to Lake Ontario not only lets me experience its own brand of lake-effect snow, but also allows me to learn how to forecast it and conduct research,” said Christina Reis ’16, who is a dual meteorology and broadcasting major and chief meteorologist at SUNY Oswego’s WTOP-10. “The opportunities are growing each year, in both the broadcasting and meteorology departments, so I am able to get plenty of hands-on experience in both fields.”

The forecasting lab faces the lake so students can watch storms approach. The deck and observation room look both north and west. And while a cutting-edge facility on a Great Lake that spans 7,320 square miles—larger than the entire state of Connecticut—may draw students here, some
opt to leave classrooms and get into the elements farther afield.

Each year, a team of students travels to Kansas as part of a Storm Chasers program. Other research initiatives have gotten students out of the classroom, including one staffed largely by undergraduate students: the OWLeS (Ontario Winter Lake-effect Systems) program. SUNY Oswego received National Science Foundation funding to fly and drive into the heart of lake-effect snowstorms to study their structure and improve forecasting.

A Community in Search of Advancement

On the heels of moving into its new space in Shineman, the meteorology department’s growth has not slowed. It hired its first climatologist, Michael Veres, who started in the Fall 2015 semester. Veres plans to broaden students’ training to include knowledge of climate dynamics, with coursework dedicated to practical computer modeling and data analysis.

Dr. Veres said he joined SUNY Oswego following the completion of his doctoral studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln because of the opportunities for growth within a strong department.

“The advanced technology allows students and faculty to perform research and further our understanding of climatology,” said Dr. Veres.

A global viewpoint will only advance students’ understanding of the weather, Dr. Veres said.

Like all sciences, meteorological advances evolve in cadence with the times and the technological advances available to its students. Reflecting on this evolution—from his time on the Oswego lakeshore to his retirement home in Sun City, Ariz., where he now lives with his wife, Gail Lehrich Shapiro ’74, Shapiro is full of admiration.

“What the students have today compared to what we had, it’s just amazing,” said Shapiro, who spent 35 years as a meteorologist for WTVT-13 in Tampa, Fla.

It was a job he landed because he had a tape of himself standing in a tiny room in Oswego’s TelePrompTer cable TV offices.

Shapiro would walk downtown to stand in front of the single camera in his parka and deliver the forecast for city residents.

No graphics, no computer modeling. Just him.

“Forecasting science has drastically improved,” said LaDue, who earned a B.S. in meteorology at Oswego. “We can tell with pretty good confidence where there will be a tornado. But while forecasting has improved, getting the desired reaction from the public remains a challenge.”

LaDue, a meteor­ologist instructor at the National Weather Service Warning Decision Training
Branch in Norman, Okla., said NWS is working to improve communications with the public, and mobile technologies can help NWS customize warnings to people based on their specific location.

“We can’t issue a one-size fits all warning and accommodate everyone,” he said. “Warnings have to be personalized.”

Through his work, he has witnessed devastating destruction as well as stories of good planning, preparation and execution of emergency plans. LaDue shared ideas of how we can improve the resiliency of our communities to severe weather through smarter building construction, different kinds of materials and better design.

He concluded the talk by predicting the future role of the human forecaster in meteorology will be more about risk management and interpretation of data than on creating models and calculating statistics, which computers are already doing better and faster than humans.

“I encourage meteorology students to take courses in crisis communications, risk management and human behavior in addition to their meteorology courses,” he said.

—Margaret Spillett

By diving head first into his program at Oswego, Kelsch says he discovered exactly what he wanted to do with his future.

He is a hydrometeorologist in the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR’s, cooperative program for operational meteorology, education and training. The program, known as COMET, offers courses and computer-based learning to professional meteorologists and students.

Kelsch spends a lot of time developing training materials for professionals in the natural sciences. As a hydrometeorologist, his expertise is in water related weather events such as floods, droughts and precipitation. One of his tasks is to take measurements of precipitation and temperature for the National Weather Service in Boulder, Colo. He also takes the measurements for the Boulder Daily Camera, whose reporters often interview him for stories about drought or snowfall. He was widely quoted during Boulder’s record-breaking flood in September 2013.

“Given that I have worked on these issues for nearly 20 years, it was very interesting to see it happen in my backyard,” Kelsch says. Most of the floods he studies are in various far-flung places throughout the world.

As a coordinator for the Colorado Climate Center’s Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow study, known as CoCoRaHs, Kelsch also trains volunteers from the community to take measurements of rain, hail and snow throughout the state to help gather data for research purposes. Kelsch said Oswego’s meteorology program enhanced by Oswego’s weather, was the perfect launching pad for his career.

—Brittany Hoffmann ’14

 Read more stories of Alumni in the Sciences

Luckily Tom Niziol ’77 made it down off that roof safely. Now he draws on his Oswego snow schooling and a 30-year career with the National Weather Service in Buffalo in his role with the country’s premier source for consumer weather information.

Niziol

Niziol joined The Weather Channel in January 2012, and immediately took to the air to explain extreme weather conditions around the country.

He is featured regularly during winter weather coverage on The Weather Channel, which reaches more than 100 million American homes. Niziol also contributes his expertise with content on The Weather Channel’s digital platforms including weather.com and social media outlets.

Niziol enjoyed being a student in Oswego’s meteorology department, he said, not only because of the school’s excellent reputation in the field but because the program was small enough to get individualized attention and the opportunity for hands-on research with faculty members. The late Professors Emeriti Eugene Chermack and Robert Sykes were his mentors and heroes, he recalls.

“Professor Sykes used to take us onto the roof of the meteorology building to begin class each day and he spent time to train us how to connect and ‘feel’ the weather. I particularly remember one day when the winds were very light, they did not even rustle the flag and he asked us to tell him the wind direction,” Niziol recalls. “We all looked for signs to help us but could not find any. Then he asked us to smell the air. It smelled sweet like chocolate and we all immediately knew that was the aroma from the Nestle chocolate factory in Fulton. Now that’s meteorology at its finest.”

Niziol’s interest in weather started young. He remembers watching the sky and following the weather as a kid, but it was his high school earth science teacher who triggered his interest in meteorology as a profession. “However, once I arrived at Oswego, it kicked my interest into high gear and meteorology became a passion,” Niziol says.

MORE: Students at SUNY Oswego Pinpoint Storms for Schools

Oswego was a logical choice for the budding meteorologist. “I picked Oswego mainly because it was one of only a couple of state schools that offered a reasonably priced college education and had a meteorology department. I also picked it because of its idyllic location on the shores of Lake Ontario — what other college campus can offer the type of sunsets and connection with storms that Oswego can?” he says.

That connection spawned a host of memories for the weather expert, like pulling a couple of co-eds off the fence at the tennis court next to Seneca Hall when they could not navigate the icy sidewalks in 60-mph winds.

“The friends, the dorms, the meteorology lab, the wrestling team workouts, the sunsets, the winter storms, the lightning over the lake — it was all wonderful and it is so nice to revisit those memories from time to time,” Niziol says. “If I had to go back and relive those days, there is very little I would change.”

After Oswego, he went to work for the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in Buffalo, now CALSPAN Corp., and from there joined the National Weather Service. He worked his way up the career ladder, eventually becoming the officer in charge of the Buffalo office.

After three decades at the government’s weather service, Niziol expected to finish out his career there, until a call came “out of the blue” from The Weather Channel, asking him to audition to ex­plain winter’s extreme weather to a national audience. He made the trip to Atlanta, auditioned and was invited to become part of a Weather Channel team that includes Oswego grads Thomas Moore ’74, who serves as coordinator of the weather forecasting program and now works hand in hand with Niziol, and Al Roker ’76, who hosts the channel’s popular “Wake Up with Al” morning program.

And how cool is it to be The Weather Channel’s winter storm expert? “I’m the luckiest man alive,” says Niziol, who cherishes his “very understanding family” and loved his dream job with the NWS in Buffalo. Now he has another dream job telling the whole nation about the weather phenomena he came to love and understand at SUNY Oswego.

“They’re local, so their forecasts are a little more accurate, a little more specific,“ Jamerson said. “They are really good at pinpointing the very time a storm will go through. Like we’ll be thinking of dismissing at noon, but they’ll say, ‘No. It will be worse at noon than at your regular dismissal time.’”

The student-staffed Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center opens for business at 4 a.m., serving mostly school districts from November through March.

Ten meteorology students run the Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center. They use what they’re being taught in the college’s meteorology department and the latest weather models on sophisticated computer software to forecast what is going to happen in Oswego hour by hour for the next day.

From this information, superintendents and transportation supervisors can decide whether they should open schools on time, later than normal or close for the day.

Working out of Oswego’s meteorology lab in Hewitt Union, the Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center opens for business at 4 a.m., when the student meteorologist on call checks the equipment to see if anything mean-looking is heading across Lake Ontario.

“Lake effect snow is very unpredictable — it’s a challenge,” said student Ben Noll ’13. “We utilize forecast models that don’t always put the (lake effect) bands in the right place.”

“We have to learn more about all the different models so we can better anticipate where the snow bands will go, “ said Jordan Rabinowitz ’13.

The Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center was the brainchild of Scott Steiger ’99, an associate professor of meteorology at Oswego. He oversees the development and operations of the center, including recruiting students to do forecasting, leading planning meetings, developing research goals and scheduling forecasters. The number of student participants varies depending on current research objectives and the number of forecast clients.

So far this year, the Oswego City School District and Oswego County BOCES have contracts with the center, which began about five years ago. Others may sign up as the season progresses. Districts pay $400 a month, money that’s used to buy equipment.

“I thought it would be a big help to school districts and others to get personalized forecasts and have a meteorologist they can call at any time, “ Steiger said. “And this is a great opportunity for the students to apply what they learned.”

Robert Peters, Liverpool school district transportation director, said Liverpool used the center a few years ago, but doesn’t now. He said the
students’ forecasts were accurate
and helpful.

“We could find out what they think, is a storm coming our way, “ Peters said. “They’d provide us with information regarding storms that we were able to use to keep the kids safe.”

Brian Donegan ’13 and Tara Heck ’13 direct the center. “We do forecasts for the schools, we update forecasts throughout the day and we’re on call 24 hours a day seven days a week, “ Donegan said. “We also update our website at 4 a.m., 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
each day.

“The most difficult thing about forecasting lake effect storms is their isolated nature,“ Donegan said. “It completely depends on the wind direction about a mile above the ground as to where the band will set up. Once that wind direction shifts, it shifts the band, so you really have to pay attention to the wind direction.”

The center’s service for school districts runs the winter season, Nov. 1 through the end of March.

— Debra J. Groom
Syracuse Post-Standard

Paul Cardinali ’65 looks out the front window of his residence, observing the afternoon’s snowfall.

“When I go to the Cape, I want hurricane force winds, high surf and rain,” Paul says. Spoken like a weather watcher whose earliest inclement memories include playing in the remnants of Hurricane Hazel in the mid-1950s.

With personal weather records that date back to 1958, Paul has been observing weather from his Fulton home and sharing his snowy findings with Central New York media outlets for the better part of five decades. The retired high school earth sciences teacher of 34 years even developed his own computer program to track the snow measurements.

“I’ve been pulled out of snow banks several times in my endeavors,” he says of the days he and Chrystal spent chasing storms with late Professor Emeritus Bob Sykes while studying earth sciences at Oswego.

“A little older and wiser,” the couple lets the storms come to them now, says Paul.

“When I see a big storm is coming, I want it,” he says. “But, I don’t want to shovel it off the roof — the excitement is still there though.”

He and his fellow Central New Yorkers are certainly in the right place for weather.

“Anyone who has lived since 1960 has seen some of the best and worst of the weather that we’ve had in 150 years,” says Paul, who has analyzed data going back to the 1830s. Some of the worst events in his memory occurred during the winters of 1966, 1974 and 2003.

An $86,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will provide SUNY Oswego meteorology faculty member Scott Steiger ’99 and his students the tools to chase the most intense snowstorms and collect first-of-its-kind data.

Meteorology Professor Scott Steiger ’99 shows images of the Doppler-on-Wheels truck and the data it will collect.

The grant will provide a radar-carrying truck from the NSF called Doppler-on-Wheels for the snowstorm-chasing season, and experts from Boulder, Colo., will train the students in its use in the month before startup. Jeffrey Frame of the University of Illinois, a colleague of Steiger’s with a lot of experience with the vehicle and instruments, is a co-principal investigator on the grant. 

Steiger, who spends his summers chasing tornadoes in the Midwest, forecasts little chance that this winter will be as quiet as last. He, distinguished service professor Al Stamm and up to 14 meteorology majors staffing the project should have plenty to study.

“It’s better than a tornado project, because the chance of catching a significant tornado on the ground is quite small,” said Steiger.

Data gathering will run from late December to early February this season, Steiger said. Lake-effect conditions set up early in the winter, when Lake Ontario’s waters still hold summer warmth and icy cold winds blow out of the west and northwest.

Data analysis and writing for the project will take place next spring and summer, followed by publication and conference presentations in the second year of the grant.

If the data-collection effort and results warrant, Steiger said he plans in time to apply for a larger grant, which would fund the use of aircraft and other instruments as well as the Doppler-on-Wheels.

— Jeff Rea ’71