“It’s all physics,” he adds, launching into an explanation of “cubes” and “stacking,” and how difficult it is to predict weather more than a couple days out. The ability to forecast the weather got better due to technology and computer modeling, which is based on numbers that are crunched by “some of the fastest computers in the world,” he says.
#Upper dublin high school calendar tv#
“Those guys are trained meteorologists,” he says of TV weather forecasters. “Weather grew from this miniscule player into this huge phenomenal market. Weather became “the thing that sells the news” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Schmidt said. His meteorology course, one of the four advanced geoscience courses he teaches, is the only university-accredited high school meteorology program in Pennsylvania. School administrators and athletic coaches will ask him for predictions from time to time, which can put him on the spot when a visiting sports team has arrived and is waiting on the field, he says.Īlthough he emphasizes “I’m not a meteorologist,” he does have a certificate from Penn State University in meteorology, which, he says, was only second in difficulty to earn after his doctorate in education – “what I came out with was amazing. “I do it only as events require, things that warrant attention,” Schmidt said, noting last year he put out 26 STORMcasts. 22 – but apparently the 198 on his email list are into sharing, “so I get thousands of hits” for major events. He doesn’t give out the website address as he has no desire to “go commercial” – he did give permission to the Gazette to extract part of his updated storm prediction Jan. When he moved to the high school in 2000, he set up a webpage, where he runs information on his courses and posts material for his students with one tab for his STORMcasts. “It’s flattering, but that was never my intent.” “If I don’t do it, I get emails asking me ‘what’s the matter,'” he says. The STORMcast, combining his dry, sarcastic sense of humor coupled with his meteorology knowledge, “developed a personality and following of its own,” and “slowly it got distributed to a lot of different places.” There was science in there, but I made fun of the hysteria that pervades these events,” Schmidt says. It started in the late 1990s when he was at the middle school and began putting out emails to about 30 staff members with a “tongue in cheek look at the weather. It’s days like this you don’t want to make a mistake – this is your playoff game,” Schmidt says. 21 explained Friday morning how it all came about and how he does it. The man behind the STORMcast that got 1,000 hits in four hours Jan. That’s when, the Upper Dublin High School Science Department chair says, his hands gesticulating, the nine flat screens on his classroom wall light up with bright colors and alarms sound from the weather station on the high school roof. But say “thunderstorm” and Rich Schmidt’s face lights up.
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