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.

Winter break’s heavy snows and a radar-lugging vehicle known as a Doppler-on-Wheels have enabled Professor Scott Steiger ’99 and several meteorology students to witness never-before-seen phenomena — like a line of seven tornado-like waterspouts in one lake-effect storm — and to collect unique data.

The first-of-its-kind use for the million-dollar vehicle — best known for chasing tornados in Discovery Channel programs — also has attracted local media, national scientific press and international filmmaking attention.

cott Steiger ’99, center, assistant professor of meteorology, explains uses of the rolling radar and laboratory known as a Doppler-on-Wheels to Charles Colville, director, left, and Helen Czerski, physicist and presenter, of a British Broadcasting Corp. team in Oswego this January for a segment of an upcoming Discovery Channel series titled “23 Degrees.”

A six-person British Broadcasting Corp. crew filmed Oswego’s lake-effect chasers one January weekend for a planned Discovery Channel series called “23 Degrees,” a yearlong global journey in search of stories to reveal Earth’s relationship with the sun. (The title refers to the tilt of Earth’s axis in relationship to the sun.)

Director Charles Colville, physicist and presenter Helen Czerski and coworkers “enjoyed” perfect conditions for their planned
segment on the prodigious snow machines that Steiger has named long-lake axis parallel (LLAP) lake-effect storms. It was
a cold, busy weekend.

The crew arrived in Oswego Thursday night Jan. 13 and spent Friday and Saturday filming an exhaustive series of scenes and interviews — including some with a helicopter — before following Steiger, Josh Wurman of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder and meteorology students as they chased a storm that dumped up to 20 lake-effect inches on Oswego County and its neighbors.

Steiger and co-principal investigator Al Stamm, distinguished service professor and earth sciences chair, won an $86,000 National Science Foundation grant and the loan of NSF-owned equipment like the DOW.

The DOW’s dual polarimetric radar — it scans vertically as well as horizontally — enables the scientists to measure the speed of descent of particles in the storm, allowing categorization and, eventually, Steiger trusts, a better tool for predicting the volume of snow and the duration of storms.

Media attention followed the DOW nearly since it arrived in mid-December. Oswego High School students heard a talk by Steiger and toured the vehicle on Dec. 21; reporter Racquel Asa of WSYR-TV in Syracuse followed the DOW in action on Jan. 4; and a Jan. 11 NSF feature story on Oswego’s research ran on a variety of websites, including one in Germany.

— Jeff Rea ’71

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