Tom Skilling, WGN-TV chief meteorologist emeritus, collaborates with Lisa Dent to host a podcast to spread awareness about the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration amid cuts from the Trump administration. Skilling is joined by some top meteorological experts who discuss the impacts that weather has on our lives and explain how the staffing cuts will impact the services that affect people everyday.

Tom’s Panelists:

Dr. Louis Uccellini – moved from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he achieved his doctorate in meteorology, to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center where he headed the NASA’s mesoscale meteorological computer modeling and analysis effort–then to the National Weather Service in 1989 where he ascended to the agency’s top position. Dr. Uccellini joined the National Weather Service in 1989, assuming that agency’s top position as  from 2013 through 2022. There he oversaw every facet of the National Weather Service’s operation–working toward CLEARER MESSAGING of the agency’s increasingly accurate forecasts issued to the public and the array of users who depend on weather information in our country while developing close ties with the critical agencies that respond to our country’s most severe weather–from tornadoes to floods, hurricane, snowstorms–even tsunamis and space weather, which in our technologically driven world, can have huge and potentially disruptive impacts on everything from communications to electrical grids and pipelines. 

Ed Fenelon – headed the National Weather Service Chicago Forecast Office as part of a 33 year career in the National Weather Service–a career which took him from Williston, ND to Kansas City; Ann Arbor, MI; Marquette, MI and here to Chicago in 2005. He headed the Chicago National Weather Service Office the next 15 years. Ed and an array of his meteorological colleagues from the National Weather Service Forecast Office here in Chicago (at Romeoville) joined us year after year at our Fermilab presentations—presentations which couldn’t have been as successfully produced were it not for the active annual involvement of Ed and the meteorologists who work so hard and staff the NWS Chicago office.

Dr. Don Wuebbles – Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Champaign is an expert on climate change science. In his early years as a scientist, Wuebbles was among the young scientists who established the relationship between chlorofluorocarbon propellants in aerosol cans and the destruction of the UV absorbing stratospheric ozone layer. The result of his work was the passage of an international ban on these propellants as part of the groundbreaking Montreal Protocol.  Dr. Wuebbles has two degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in Atmospheric Science. After 20 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. Wuebbles came back to the University of Illinois as Professor and Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in 1994. He also led the development of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at the University, and was its first director. Dr. Wuebbles is an expert in atmospheric physics and chemistry, with over 600 scientific publications related to the Earth’s climate, air quality and stratospheric ozone. He also provides analyses and development of metrics for translating science to policy and societal responses. He has been a leader in many international and national scientific assessments, including being a coordinating lead author on international climate assessments led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), thus contributing to IPCC being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.