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.

“They’re local, so their forecasts are a little more accurate, a little more specific,“ Jamerson said. “They are really good at pinpointing the very time a storm will go through. Like we’ll be thinking of dismissing at noon, but they’ll say, ‘No. It will be worse at noon than at your regular dismissal time.’”

The student-staffed Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center opens for business at 4 a.m., serving mostly school districts from November through March.

Ten meteorology students run the Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center. They use what they’re being taught in the college’s meteorology department and the latest weather models on sophisticated computer software to forecast what is going to happen in Oswego hour by hour for the next day.

From this information, superintendents and transportation supervisors can decide whether they should open schools on time, later than normal or close for the day.

Working out of Oswego’s meteorology lab in Hewitt Union, the Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center opens for business at 4 a.m., when the student meteorologist on call checks the equipment to see if anything mean-looking is heading across Lake Ontario.

“Lake effect snow is very unpredictable — it’s a challenge,” said student Ben Noll ’13. “We utilize forecast models that don’t always put the (lake effect) bands in the right place.”

“We have to learn more about all the different models so we can better anticipate where the snow bands will go, “ said Jordan Rabinowitz ’13.

The Lake Effect Storm Prediction and Research Center was the brainchild of Scott Steiger ’99, an associate professor of meteorology at Oswego. He oversees the development and operations of the center, including recruiting students to do forecasting, leading planning meetings, developing research goals and scheduling forecasters. The number of student participants varies depending on current research objectives and the number of forecast clients.

So far this year, the Oswego City School District and Oswego County BOCES have contracts with the center, which began about five years ago. Others may sign up as the season progresses. Districts pay $400 a month, money that’s used to buy equipment.

“I thought it would be a big help to school districts and others to get personalized forecasts and have a meteorologist they can call at any time, “ Steiger said. “And this is a great opportunity for the students to apply what they learned.”

Robert Peters, Liverpool school district transportation director, said Liverpool used the center a few years ago, but doesn’t now. He said the
students’ forecasts were accurate
and helpful.

“We could find out what they think, is a storm coming our way, “ Peters said. “They’d provide us with information regarding storms that we were able to use to keep the kids safe.”

Brian Donegan ’13 and Tara Heck ’13 direct the center. “We do forecasts for the schools, we update forecasts throughout the day and we’re on call 24 hours a day seven days a week, “ Donegan said. “We also update our website at 4 a.m., 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
each day.

“The most difficult thing about forecasting lake effect storms is their isolated nature,“ Donegan said. “It completely depends on the wind direction about a mile above the ground as to where the band will set up. Once that wind direction shifts, it shifts the band, so you really have to pay attention to the wind direction.”

The center’s service for school districts runs the winter season, Nov. 1 through the end of March.

— Debra J. Groom
Syracuse Post-Standard

Paul Cardinali ’65 looks out the front window of his residence, observing the afternoon’s snowfall.

“When I go to the Cape, I want hurricane force winds, high surf and rain,” Paul says. Spoken like a weather watcher whose earliest inclement memories include playing in the remnants of Hurricane Hazel in the mid-1950s.

With personal weather records that date back to 1958, Paul has been observing weather from his Fulton home and sharing his snowy findings with Central New York media outlets for the better part of five decades. The retired high school earth sciences teacher of 34 years even developed his own computer program to track the snow measurements.

“I’ve been pulled out of snow banks several times in my endeavors,” he says of the days he and Chrystal spent chasing storms with late Professor Emeritus Bob Sykes while studying earth sciences at Oswego.

“A little older and wiser,” the couple lets the storms come to them now, says Paul.

“When I see a big storm is coming, I want it,” he says. “But, I don’t want to shovel it off the roof — the excitement is still there though.”

He and his fellow Central New Yorkers are certainly in the right place for weather.

“Anyone who has lived since 1960 has seen some of the best and worst of the weather that we’ve had in 150 years,” says Paul, who has analyzed data going back to the 1830s. Some of the worst events in his memory occurred during the winters of 1966, 1974 and 2003.

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