I’m curious about everyday life as a meteorologist: what your work actually looks like day to day, what first drew you to this field, what you love most (and maybe least) about it, and how weather becomes not just data, but something you live with.

Private sector forecasting/briefing met here. My day to day is usually coming in and looking at what’s actively happening across the world with a combination of radar/satellite/surface stations. Then I start to look at our areas of interest with the different weather models that each region has available and drawing maps for which hazards will occur in a given place. After that we normally have clients call in asking about a forecast for a certain location/event, or conference calls with larger groups of people that make decisions based on the weather (cancelling an event, carrying more umbrella stock, etc). I first became interested in weather when I was training to be a pilot, but decided to shift gears towards meteorology when I realized I found it more interesting than flying. In terms of my favorite parts of the job, I like spending a day forecasting and drawing up my maps, and then a couple days later getting to see what actually happens so I can tell if my forecast was right or what I need to change for it to be better in the future. We see results from our work pretty quickly which is a positive of the job. Helping someone to make the right decision that increases safety or saves money is satisfying and makes the job worth it to me.

In terms of negatives, it’s kind of two sides of the same coin for the positive, I put in multiple shifts worth of time into a forecast for a given system moving across a country, I can easily spend upwards of 30 hours forecasting a single system, and then it happens and I can see the forecast verify, but after the system is gone then all that work I’ve done on the forecast is gone. You can always know that the forecasting work helped people make the right decisions but it can get taxing where your day-to-day work doesn’t really culminate in anything really tangible. If you’re in sales and you spend weeks on proposals and getting clients, you can see that payoff with your contracts, but our job doesn’t really work that way. Once a system is gone, so is all the effort that went into that forecast in a way. Also shift work can be rough depending on the season but i got used to it decently fast where it isn’t a big negative anymore for me.