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<\/a>Terry Kelly, UW-Madison alumnus and entrepreneur, charted a new course for real-time television weather broadcasting. Credit: Bryce Richter UW-Madison<\/p><\/div>\n
Terry Kelly, University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus and entrepreneur, turned consulting and television weathercasting on its end through his revolutionary work in computerized weather. Last year, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) honored Kelly with its highest distinction \u2014 Fellow of the AMS<\/a> \u2014 for his leading role in charting a new course for real-time television weather broadcasting.<\/p>\n Like another UW visionary, Verner Suomi<\/a>, Kelly brought timely weather information in visual formats out of the research laboratory and into the homes of the public.\u00a0 As SSEC worked to provide satellite and radar imagery in real time and in higher resolution, Kelly and his team invented the real-time weather displays required to make such data useful.<\/p>\n According to Kelly, though, finding his path to meteorology was anything but straightforward. His journey took him from learning to fly airplanes through dangerous weather, to pairing television weather broadcasts with computer advancements.<\/p>\n In fact, he took a leave-of-absence from college because he was undecided about a major. By chance, he saw a tiny ad in the Boston Globe that said, \u201cCome work for us and we\u2019ll teach you to fly!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I thought it sounded like fun to learn how to fly a Piper Aircraft but in less than a week on the job, I had caught my hair in the drill press!\u201d says Kelly. Rather than fire him, the union machinist crew took Kelly under their collective wings, situating him at the end of the assembly line where he was involved with quality control \u2014 removing bad rivets from planes and replacing them with good ones \u2014 rather than operating heavy machinery.<\/p>\n As promised by his employer, Kelly learned how to fly, earning instrument and multi-engine ratings in the process. It was during his flights along the US east coast that Kelly encountered severe weather situations, \u201cat least one or two of which I probably should not have survived,\u201d he notes.<\/p>\n Two graphical representations of weather systems, both created by Kelly and his team, but decades apart. Prior to the team’s work on computerized weather graphics, newscasters would use several hand-drawn pictures and pan the camera from left to right to show the sequence of predicted weather. Side-by-side, they show the evolution of weather graphics and the processes to create and transmit them. Credit: Terry Kelly<\/p><\/div>\n From his vantage point above (and in) the clouds and storms, Kelly remembered his childhood fascination with the beauty of the skies and the early days of television weather. According to Kelly, whenever the weather segment aired on television, he would place plastic wrap over the screen, draw the fronts with markers and check his predictive accuracy the next day. Although he recalls being teased about his preoccupation with the weather, it finally dawned on him many years later when flying a Piper Aircraft that he could be a meteorologist, the notion \u201chitting him on the back of the head,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/a>