Bio for Mr. Jack Bushong Jr. 

Jack Bushong received his degree in Meteorology at Florida State University in 1988. He trained for Television weathercasting the following year but was recruited by the National Weather Service (NWS) which is a Federal Agency and a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). His first NWS office was near his hometown of Muskegon, MI, in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he had extensive training in Surface Weather Observations, Weather Forecasting and the issuance of Severe Weather Warnings to the public. Mr. Bushong, also, received training in Pilot Weather Briefings.

In 1991, Mr. Bushong transferred to his hometown at the NWS Office in Muskegon. NWS Muskegon was a weather radar site where he received extensive weather radar training in order to be on shift alone. The NWS was undergoing the most ambitious modernization and restructuring program through the early 1990s where the new NWS Doppler Radar would become a major part of all NWS offices across the country.

In 1994, Mr. Bushong was transferred with promotion to the NWS Southeast River Forecast Center (SERFC) in Atlanta, GA. The SERFC has responsibility for all river forecasting and river flooding forecasts across the Southeastern US and Puerto Rico. Mr. Bushong worked alongside hydrologists as a meteorologist where he produced rainfall forecasts for river forecasting models. He also was trained in river forecasting and Hydrology as well.

One important duty for the SERFC by Mr. Bushong was to calibrate radar precipitation estimates based on ground-based rain gauges. Under his large area of responsibility, Mr. Bushong needed to have an enormous amount of training and knowledge of how weather radars work. Across the Southeast USA, 35 NWS radars are used in a mosaic and calibrated with over 2000 rain gauges.

Mr. Bushong has a great interest in computer programming and web page development. From the beginning of the Internet age, Mr. Bushong produced the first web page for the SERFC and remained webmaster until his retirement. Mr. Bushong also used his programming skills to produce graphics from the text products the NWS produced at the time by mapping river conditions and forecasts. Mr. Bushong was the first webmaster across the NWS to create graphs (Hydrographs), in real-time, depicting river and flood forecasts to make radar forecasts easier to read for customers such as FEMA. In fact, Mr. Bushong received the Regional Director’s Award along with a cash bonus for not only a near perfect rain forecast for Hurricane Floyd in 1999, but also rushed to complete the programming to display hydrographs as requested by FEMA. Hurricane Floyd resulted in the worst flooding in North Carolina history.

NWS Headquarters decided to use Mr. Bushong’s examples of new web products for their creation of the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System (AHPS). Mr. Bushong was also on the NWS team which brough real time NWS radar images to the web.

After retirement from the NWS in 2016, Mr. Bushong kept his interest in computers and programming. Other interests include Photography, Drone Photography and 3D Printing, and playing Flight Simulator in his spare time. Mr. Bushong has been a big fan of Microsoft Flight Simulator since 1993, fulfilling his strong interest in aircraft.

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Music for LITD ad spot provided by Ten Thousand Teeth song: Frostbite https://open.spotify.com/track/4fFfmsg51lHHJ118v9mMYi?si=ef96b5dbf7ac4034

Intro music: Balance by THIK from the album Shok the World

Outro music: Aggressive State by Subsidence