“Our mission is to offer a balance of weather news and entertainment,
Dang.. I want weather only...stick to your strengths people..lol
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 50330/1013
ATLANTA — Jim Cantore has spent a dozen years covering hurricanes and other dangerous storms for The Weather Channel. But he was as surprised as anybody when Hurricane Charley took an unanticipated detour through Lee and Charlotte counties. Most forecasters said it was headed to Tampa Bay.
"After it blew up and took that right hook, I suddenly realized, 'Oh my God, we are going to be in the meat of this thing, and I have so many people here who have never been through something like this,' " says Cantore, known for his vibrant, animated style and willingness to confront Mother Nature at its harshest. "Some of the crew and other reporters with us had no idea what they were in for and I had to get them organized and out of there."
Cantore — who would then cover hurricanes Frances, Ivan and Jeanne — didn't waste any time. He hightailed it from a motel on Sanibel Island, stopping briefly at a hotel near the Sanibel Causeway before decamping to downtown Fort Myers. For the voluble Cantore and his fellow storm chasers at The Weather Channel, it's part of the job of covering any and all weather events 24 hours a day.
That expanded coverage resulted in the channel's best ratings, drawing 3.5 million viewers for the "Evening Edition" of Sept. 15, hours before Hurricane Ivan slammed into the Pensacola area.
Cantore was back in Southwest Florida earlier this month, filming a special that will look at the impact of the hurricane season. "2004: Hurricane Onslaught" airs at 8:30 p.m on Sunday, Oct. 31.
When it comes to Weather Channel coverage, "there is one big difference between what we do and what a basic news operation does," says Saul Russell, assignment manager for the cable and satellite-delivered network. "When we go out to cover a weather story our main focus and thrust is to be out ahead of the storm, whereas other people may focus more on the main impact of a storm and maybe what happens next. But we plan for it and try to react before anything happens.”
Russell says a team of producers, storm experts and other meteorologists began looking at what turned into Hurricane Charley as a disturbance coming off the coast of Africa, “and we began paying close attention to what it was doing and how it was developing.”
Once it becomes clear one of those disturbances will turn into a tropical storm or even a hurricane, The Weather Channel’s logistical planners have to figure out where to send reporters, technical crews and satellite trucks. That’s not easy, especially when it means crisscrossing a huge state like Florida, tracking the landfall of multiple hurricanes.
“We had a crew in the Panhandle to cover Tropical Storm Bonnie (Aug. 12), but it turned out to not be much of a storm,” says Gus Lalone, vice president and managing editor for the channel. “Charley (Aug. 13) was also on the way, so that really stretched our resources and we had people from Fort Myers up to Tampa and then into the Carolinas. If you look at the cone of uncertainty for a storm it can cover Florida and then be anywhere from Alabama to North Carolina. Even when it narrows and a storm hits land we still follow it because it continues to cause problems. Florida really got whacked this year but the storms also hit a lot of places inland.”
When Cantore and his fellow meteorologists come in from the storm, they head to The Weather Channel’s nondescript headquarters in suburban northwest Atlanta, a city chosen for its temperate climate and the minimal risk of bad weather shutting down the operation. A huge newsroom, with two main sets for on-the-air reporting and desks for the reporters shares space with banks of electronic equipment. Like other contemporary sets, many of the cameras are operated by computers.
Often facing long hours riding out a storm, staffers — including more than 120 meteorologists — can eat at The Front Cafe, actually a cafeteria with weather-related names. Want a salad? Head to the twister toss. Pick up a sandwich at the Doppler deli or hot dishes at the heat wave. Soda pop and other drinks can be found at the iso bar.
With four major hurricanes hitting Florida in six weeks, The Weather Channel had plenty of weather to cover. At one point, Lalone says, they stayed with live coverage for almost 48 hours. He adds that they continued to run two-minute “Local on the 8s” segments, “but, at that point, the hurricanes really were a national story. So many people live in Florida or have family, friends or homes there.”
Since debuting in 1982, the channel now reaches more than 87 million subscribers. The Weather Channel remains the flagship of the operation. It also offers weather.com on the Internet, syndicated services to radio and newspapers and Weatherscan, a 24-hour cable service focusing on local weather information.
“Our mission is to offer a balance of weather news and entertainment, but it is a business and we derive our revenue through ratings,” Lalone says. “We always try to upgrade our talent and try to throw as much resources at a story as we can. We can’t let other stations or networks out-cover us on weather stories or we lose.”
When the weather turns bad, Stu Ostro, senior director of weather communications and a meteorologist himself, turns to four “experts,” including Dr. Steve Lyons, whose forte is tropical storms. Other equally experienced experts deal with winter weather, severe events like tornadoes and flash floods, and there’s also a specialist in climates.
Ostro and Lyons work on the cone of uncertainty, which can vary from one source to another.
“Although we do our own cone, we look very closely at the National Hurricane Center and other sources,” Ostro says. “Generally, their track would be in the center of our cone, but, from there, we either widen or narrow it, depending on our confidence or the degree of uncertainty. Everybody looks at all the information and then makes their decisions based on what they see on radar satellite observations, computer models and their own information and they interpret it their own way.”
Ostro says the basic goal is to provide as much information on a storm as they can, wherever it’s coming from. Nonetheless, the protracted build-up to a hurricane can make it more compelling than some other weather stories.
“To somebody like myself, who has had weather in their blood since they were 3, it is all awesome,” Ostro says of predicting and anticipating weather. “But we always have mixed feelings about these things, because they can bring destruction and loss of life while it is also this incredible force of nature to observe. It’s our job to warn people in time and mitigate the loss of life and property. Whatever we do, it’s gonna happen and we try to help people as much as we can.”
• Jim Cantore will host a special on Florida's hurricanes — "2004: Hurricane Onslaught" — at 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 31.
