LYNDON STATE COLLEGE
Lyndon State College gave me a unique opportunity to gain invaluable experience within the field of meteorology. Throughout my four year duration at Lyndon, I not only obtained in-depth knowledge of the science itself, but also how to apply that knowledge through real world applications in both forecasting and broadcasting. This included forecasting on both a local scale and national scale, tested in a variety of environments.
Me with The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore
FORECASTING
Every year, the University of Oklahoma hosts a national forecasting contest (WxChallenge) in which approximately 2000 undergraduates, graduates, and professionals compete in providing the most accurate forecasts for various locations around the country. These forecasts consist of daily max and min temperature as well as wind and precipitation for 10 locations that change every 2 weeks; a total of 20 weeks of forecasting. At the conclusion of the 2013-2014 season, I was able to place 2nd as an undergraduate and 3rd overall in the contest. I was also able to place in the top 5% for the 2014-2015 season.
As a lead forecaster for the Vermont Institute of Applied Meteorology’s VIAM project, I was able to provide winter weather forecasts for the Vermont Agency of Transportation (Vtrans). This included managing a team of forecasters that issued state wide weather forecasts to anticipate potentially hazardous road conditions. The duration of this project is throughout the entire winter season, from early November to late March and often includes April.
BROADCASTING
During my junior year at Lyndon, myself and six of my classmates created the New England Storm Center, an online weather show that aired twice daily (mornings and evenings). In just over a month, we had gained over 1,000 likes on Facebook alone, and our videos were reaching thousands more throughout all of New England. These shows were also completely student run and were all individually produced and recorded.
After my junior year at Lyndon, I interned at Fox 25 Boston with Meteorologist Fred Campagna and Chief Meteorologist Kevin Lemanowicz. My duties mainly consisted of updating online graphics content, as well as updating graphics for Fred Campagna’s weekend evening shows, through use of WSI TruVu MAX and MAX Storm. I also was able to practice recorded weather hits myself once a week, design a few new weather graphics, and produce a full weather hit for Chief Meteorologist Kevin Lemanowicz while he was reporting live from Quincy’s Walliston Beach.
GRAPHICS
Having had web design experience dating back to middle school, developing weather graphics quickly became of second nature to me. I have developed graphics that are both practical and innovative, and in college started making weather graphics my Junior year, and eventually created two separate weather productions from scratch. Although most of my graphic design work is with WSI TruVu MAX, I am also proficient with Adobe Photoshop where many of my innovative weather graphics were developed aside from MAX.
Here is an example of one of my graphics developed in college and used on Lyndon’s News 7 weather show. This graphic was a 3-Dimensional temperature trend that automatically adjusted and changed color based on model data and manual adjustments. This graphic was intended to fit the 3-D graphic style of weather graphic at the time, and be visually pleasing, but also simplistic enough to offer valuable information to the viewer. More of my graphics (and more recent graphics) are available here: www.ajwaterman.com/experience/graphics