Editorial
Front Page - Friday, January 1, 2010
A childhood fear of tornadoes leads to career as a meteorologist
Stephanie Coward
When Chief Meteorologist for Channel 9 News David Glenn was 8 years old, he had a great fear of tornadoes. He never thought that taking control of the fear would catapult him into his dream job.
“Technology wasn’t that great back in the mid-’70s. They’d break into TV and some guy would say, ‘Hey tornado warning, back to programming.’ And you’re like, ‘What does that mean?’” Glenn said. “And so I asked my parents, ‘What is that all about?’ and they said, ‘Look it up in the encyclopedia.’”
Glenn listened to his parents and read all about tornadoes and was quite fascinated by them. “And then when we had another outbreak of storms, I thought ‘I wonder if that’s gonna be a tornado warning’ and oh that was it. So that kind of spearheaded that,” he said. “And I did high school science projects on weather.” He was also a weather spotter for Channel 9 when he was a teenager, which is the same thing as a weather watcher today. “So I’ve kind of come full circle here.”
Originally from Chickamagua, Glenn worked locally at WRCB from 1991 to 1998. In 1998 he moved to WPMI, an NBC affiliate that covered the Mobile, Ala. and Pensacola, Fla. region until 2006.
It was at WPMI that he was part of five direct storm hits. Hurricane Ivan and Katrina were the two largest storms, with the most severe regional impact that he covered. “My family had to evacuate three times in one year,” he said.
“You read about it in a textbook and you study it, but to be down there in it is a totally different thing. Ivan happened at night, so that was scary in itself,” Glenn said. “But then Katrina happened during the day, so you could see everything happening. And we were on the east side of the storm, which was the worst side.”
During Ivan, Glenn and others at the station worked 36 hours straight. It was different with Katrina because the station’s generator caught fire while the storm was hitting. The team had to evacuate to the Midtown radio station where they were simulcasting from. “That was some bad, white-knuckle driving,” Glenn said. He spent over 48 continuous hours covering Katrina.
Today Glenn’s days remain quite long. A typical day begins at 6:30 a.m. when he wakes up with his sons, Jack and Carter. “That’s where I’m looking over everything because I put out a forecast at 11 o’clock the night before. I want to make sure everything is going smoothly,” Glenn said. “We also have the StormTrack 9 blog, which we update all the time so if there’s been any change, we’ll update things, but I want to get a check on what’s happening first thing in the morning.”
He spends the rest of the morning and early afternoon doing chores and checking on the forecast. “It’s kind of a 24-hour thing, where I’m just constantly checking computer model data, updating the blog and updating our Web site,” Glenn said.
After working all morning, he makes it into the studio in the mid-afternoon. “Then when I get here it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the forecast for the night,” Glenn said. “And really the hardest part of the day is generating that forecast. The easiest part is being on camera. That’s the easy part.”
Glenn and the other meteorologists don’t work from a script ever. “We make our own forecast and make our own maps,” Glenn said. The maps generated but the team are described by Glenn as resembling a powerpoint presentation.
“The hardest part is figuring out, is it going to rain? … Is it gonna snow? … How cold is it going to be? And then hoping that it’s right,” Gelnn said. “Yeah, there’s still those days where you can look at the data a hundred times over and it’s not going to do what you want it to do.”
After the graphics are made, and uploaded to the system, in under a minute, Glenn has to do the 5, 5:30 and 6 p.m. forecasts. Then he gets dinner and comes back to prepare and look everything over again for the 11 p.m. forecast.
“I really forecast all throughout the day, whether it’s on the blog, on the Web site or on the air. So it’s kind of an ongoing process,” Glenn said. “Even on weekends and during time off.”
And for those who relish bad weather, just wait for Glenn to go on vacation. “If I take time off, the weather’s gonna be bad, Trust me. Every time.” This may be an ongoing joke that has followed Glenn from his days in Mobile, but he was in New York City with his family when Chattanooga had its first snow a few weeks ago.
Now that he made it back to News Channel 9, Glenn plans to stay put for the duration of his career. “This is where I’ve always wanted to be. This was a job from the get go that I wanted. Some people aspire to go to other networks, or weather channel, no this was always it,” Glenn said. “I’m exactly where I’ve always wanted to be. This is my dream job. This is where I grew up. This is where I always wanted to get to.” Both he and his wife Rebecca knew that they would eventually make it back to this area that they missed so during their 10-year absence.
And always the meteorologist, Glenn graciously accepted a request for long-term winter forecast. “What we’ve seen already this December I think is going to be a preview of
winter. I think we’re gonna be below normal in temperature. I think our chance of snowfall is gonna be near normal which is a lot better than it was the past couple of years,” he said. “We’ll have several chances (of snow) this year. I think it will be colder than normal, in fact this December we’ve already been about three and a half degrees below normal. And it’s not just us. I think it’s gonna be a large part of the east. Anywhere east of the Mississippi it’s gonna be really cold this year.”
For weather updates throughout the day, visit the News Channel 9 StormTrack blog at http://stormtrack9.freedomblogging.com/.
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