When Kelvin Droegemeier watched the Wizard of Oz as a child, the tornado scenes scared him so much that he didn’t want to look. Today, the esteemed meteorologist watches storms for a living—with a particular interest in tornados.

From his upbringing in central Kansas—where he grew up marveling at weather and storms—to his undergraduate internship with the National Severe Storms Lab, Droegemeier was primed for a brilliant career in meteorology.

Droegemeier is currently the vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma, where he is also Regents Professor of meteorology; Weathernews Chair Emeritus; and Roger and Sherry Teigen Presidential Professor.

He is also the vice-chairman of the national science board at the National Science Foundation. In 1989, he co-founded CAPS, the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms. This center pioneered storm scale numerical weather prediction with data simulation, which ushered in a whole new science of studying the weather.

Droegemeier talks with STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Tom Jones about the past, present and future of weather prediction, both in the U.S. and globally.

For more information on Droegemeier, check out his home page at the University of Oklahoma: http://kkd.ou.edu as well as his biography at the National Science Board: http://tinyurl.com/zwwvav9.

Here is also the report that came out of that, entitled “Hurricane Warning: The Critical Need for a National Hurricane Research Initiative: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2007/hurricane/initiative.pdf

00:47: Ken Ford describes Droegemeier as a pioneer in understanding thunderstorm dynamics and predictability, computational fluid dynamics, aviation weather, modeling and predicting of extreme weather, among other areas.

1:13: Dawn says: “Kelvin has greatly shaped the scientific landscape in meteorology and storm prediction and tracking. His work has no doubt saved many lives.”

2:00: Ford was co-chairman on the National Science Board Task Force on Hurricanes, Science and Engineering in 2005-06. “Living in Pensacola and having just experienced Hurricane Ivan, and then Hurricane Katrina, I was highly motivated to work on this problem…. Around here we’ve come to fear hurricanes with Russian names like Ivan and Katrina.”

3:20: Ford reads iTunes review from “ARFO6C”: “Brilliant, just brilliant.”

4:37: “Growing up in central Kansas, I was exposed to interesting weather year-round. I remember as a child being fascinated by the power and the grandeur of the atmosphere, and how quickly the weather could change.”

7:00: Droegemeier is especially interested in spring storms and wind. “To me, the perfect day is 60 degrees, low clouds, winds at 40 mph…. [There is something] so wonderful and powerful about the wind.”.

11:06: As a child, Droegemeier was interested in science, but it wasn’t until his undergraduate work study job at the National Severe Storms Lab, where an advisor suggested graduate school, that his academic interest in weather was sparked.

12:35: He went to graduate school at the University of Illinois to work with a person who was a pioneer in using super computers to make 3D models of thunderstorms. They looked at storms’ rotation, or the pathways to understanding how tornados form.

13:50: He describes “seminal changes in the last 20-30 years in meteorology, driven by high-performance computing.”

15:04: Twenty years ago, the first national network of Doppler weather radar also emerged. This allowed sensing the directional movement of precipitation particles.

17:30: He says the data simulation models have “dramatically improved over the last two decades. We are able to predict up to 72 hours more precisely than what we were able to do twenty years ago [predicting] up to 36 hours.”

18:00: CAPS is one of the first 11 science/technology centers funded by the NSF. It was selected out of 323 applicants. The premise was the following question: ‘Could ...