Tom Skilling: Q&A With WGN-TV’s chief meteorologist on ‘barbaric’ cold and snowy weather from the city’s past

It’s been a weird winter weatherwise, so we asked WGN-TV chief meteorologist Tom Skilling to put it in context.

[ Record warm start to Chicago winter to continue this week ]

Starting his successful career at 14, Skilling was hired by WKKD in Aurora while attending West Aurora High School. He went to Madison in 1970 to study meteorology at the University of Wisconsin. This year marks his 45th anniversary at WGN.

Skilling spoke with the Tribune during a phone interview Wednesday. (This conversation has been edited for clarity.)

It’s been warm. Why is January such a crazy weather month for us?

A: Well, I’ll tell you — it’s an extension of that same Pineapple Express atmospheric river pattern that’s been lambasting California and areas in the West. Obviously, they need the rain. I wish they had the infrastructure to capture all of it. Unfortunately, a lot of it runs off, floods and produces mudslides.

You know, this is a La Nina winter and we’ve done some in-house work on these. Since 1950, La Nina winters have been very volatile in this area. You move from arctic air masses one week to unseasonably mild air the next. We had that cold blast that hit around Christmas week. Now, we’re in the 22nd consecutive day of above normal temperatures. This already is the second-warmest January on the books here — at least so far it is. You have to go back to 1850 to find a January 1-17 period that’s warmer than what we’ve seen this year. We’re running 10 degrees above normal, 14 degrees warmer than the same period a year ago.

I was mentioning last night that we are also in a snow drought, by the way. This season today ties for the second-least snowy in 79 years — back to World War II — in 1944. We’ve had five days, and that’s it, with a little bit of snow measured on the ground. None in the month of January.

Chicago has experienced some of its coldest and snowiest weather on record during January, right?

A: You so accurately point out that January is typically our coldest and one of our snowiest months and home to some of our blockbuster historic snowstorms, not the least of which is the benchmark blizzard of 1967 that shut the city down.

[ Vintage photos remind us Chicago has always been cold ]

And, of course, the Chicago Machine-defeating Jane Byrne-Michael Bilandic blizzard in 1979, which was part of the winter that produced more snow than any other winter here. (Bilandic’s poor handling of snow removal helped Byrne to a mayoral victory.)

In Chicago, the winters of the 1970s were collectively our coldest and snowiest on record — and we have records that go back to 1871 and the Great Chicago Fire.

[ Chicago’s coldest recorded temperatures and longest stretches of deep freezes ]

The coldest temperatures occurred in the 1980s. We had back-to-back 26 below zero temperatures in January 1982. And then we had the all-time coldest three years later in 1985 (that was minus 27 degrees).

If you don’t believe climate change is at work, just look at what’s happened to the character of our winters around here. While the decade of the 1970s was the coldest and snowiest on record, we have warmed precipitously since then.

Last time I looked, our winters are running more than 3 degrees on average warmer than the winters of the ’70s, which is a big change. I don’t know if you remember the 1970s, but those winters were barbaric. We’d have these incredible snowstorms and then they’d be followed by these sieges of subzero weather. We don’t get that anymore.

A single cold spell or any weather event doesn’t prove or disprove climate change. Climate change is alive, well and ongoing as with planetary warming and you can still get cold and snow during planetary warming — it’s just that you get it less frequently over less area.

I mean, they had a temperature over the weekend of 80 below zero in Siberia, which broke a record there. And that’s the same area that was up over 100 degrees two summers ago, in 2021.

So, these extremes that we are seeing are part of this changing climate regime that we’re in. And, I’ll tell you, you hark back to those bitterly cold episodes in January of 1982 and 1985. Oh my gosh — you realize what a different world we’re in today.

For people who’ve moved here since, what was it like to live in Chicago during the 1979 snowstorm?

A: You couldn’t drive down a side street here in town and they were running out of places to put the snow. It was awful. That was my first year working in media in Chicago.

[ Chicago’s 10 largest snowfalls since 1886 — and how the Tribune covered them ]

I was born in Pittsburgh, my dad worked in New York City for 13 years, then we moved out to Aurora in 1965. I went to school up in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. So I’ve been here in the Midwest — except for a stint down in Jacksonville, Florida — since.

I’ll tell you, it’s indescribable these cold surges. I really wonder how the population today would handle it. You would leave work at night, and I can recall leaving WGN, and go out to a car that would not start. As you walk to it in this bitter cold, you’d hear cracking buildings and trees.

I remember one night we had to push my car from the parking lot into a back garage at WGN to allow it to warm up. They used to do Bert Weinman Ford commercials in that garage so they had a big turntable that they put the cars on as the announcer told you about the latest deal. Well, that’s the same garage into which we pushed my car and after a couple of hours, I could finally get it going again. But, oh, it was just awful!

The atmosphere took on a very almost unworldly state at that point.

That’s so hard to imagine when I look outside now and my son hasn’t even been able to go sledding yet this winter.

A: We haven’t had a day with measurable snow on the ground in January. And another thing I was looking at last night and mentioned on the air, we have less than 3% of Lake Michigan’s surface covered by ice. That’s all. Only 5% of the Great Lakes as a whole has ice on the surface and most of that’s way up in the upper Midwest.

By comparison, I was looking back through the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab’s ice coverage data last night and by the end of January 1977, 75% of the surface of Lake Michigan was covered by ice. It’s really stunning.

Is there a chance that we’ll get walloped with cold in February, March or later than usual?

A: It definitely can happen. This is a La Nina winter, which is volatile. You will switch jarringly to arctic air for some periods of these winters historically. Even though our days have begun to lengthen since the shortest day back on Dec. 21, the winter solstice, we’ll have picked up about a half-minute of daylight per day in the early part of January. By the end of this month, we’ll be gaining more than two minutes a day of sunlight. Also, the sun is tracking across the sky higher and higher with the passage of time. That means you get more direct sunlight and, with time, that alters the air mass. But there’s usually a lag time between the shortest day and the coldest temperatures.

Our average daily temperatures don’t start increasing until the end of January. Jan. 29 is the day when the average daily high and low will begin to go up.

Yes, there is a possibility of cold outbreaks. In fact, we’ve got a pattern change coming later next week that will bring colder air and now, at this point, it doesn’t look like it will be of the same intensity of December’s cold outbreak. But we’ve got to watch that.

It’s interesting. Bill Snyder, who works with me in the office, was saying he looked at the past winters that have had so little snow by this point and found that on average they have produced 2 feet of additional snow beyond this day. The fact is that we’ve gone through the highest snow producing portion of the winter, but that by no means means that we’re out of the woods for a big snowstorm.

In fact, one has this fear after such an abnormally warm and snowless winter that the other shoe will drop at some point. So, we’re going to be watching the modeling very, very carefully in the weeks ahead because history is replete with examples of big February and even March snowstorms in the area.

The first couple of weeks in April are renowned for these windshield wiper-braking snows. The really heavy, wet ones. They are called “heart attack snows” because of the difficulty shoveling them due to their high water content. Your fear is an honest one and climatologically supported.

You are amazing at what you do and obviously have a great staff. How many slides do you typically produce for one weather spot?

A: I don’t know! It’s hard to put a number on it because we run animations that go through 30, 40, 50 frames of satellite imagery. I would imagine that we go through as many as 20 different graphics.

The intention, really, is not to go through the most graphics. The intention is to visualize what’s going on. And we’re in this amazing era in meteorology, where we can visualize and very effectively with computer assistance share that with our viewers.

I’m sitting down right now and before this morning is over, I’ll pull down the forecasts from eight to 22 difference numerical models. We’re in this magnificent situation where we don’t just have one model to look at — we have scores of them. And, therefore, the assurance with which you can approach your audience and say, “Hey, we’ve got a pattern change coming,” is higher today than it used to be in the past.

You’re prolific on social media too.

A: I love this social media thing. Some people say, “Why do you spend time doing that?” Well, first of all, it’s all part of my prep for everything else I do, so everything overlaps. When you invest time looking at your models, at weather history, climatology and all the rest. Everything you do can be channeled into every one of these outlets through which we reach our audiences.

And we loved doing the Tribune page. We did that for many years. (Editor’s note: Tom Skilling debuted on the Tribune’s weather page on June 17, 1997, and continued to give readers his forecast and weather expertise explained with data and maps until August 2022.)

How much longer can we look forward to having you as a meteorologist in Chicago? Frankly, if you didn’t share photos from your travels to Alaska and Hawaii, then I would think you never take a day off.

A: I’ll tell you the truth. You know, I’ve worked since I was a teenager. Work has been my life. I mean, I could do sometimes without the deadlines and the constraints put on us by our profession. But even that is challenging and fun.

I’ve been privileged in the 50-plus years — the half century — I’ve worked in this business to watch some of the greatest advances in meteorology that have occurred in all time back to Aristotle and his “Meteorologica” that really started the whole science of meteorology, or at least was widely recognized as having done so.

University of Wisconsin was the birthplace of satellite meteorology. They were working on that when I was going to school up there. I remember sitting in classrooms watching in real time landfalling hurricanes or thunderstorm complexes. We had never seen that before.

And, of course, now we’re able to look down and infer what the winds are and the humidities so we can feed that into our computer models to know what’s going on over the 70% of the world that’s covered by ocean in order to do their forecasts for those of us on land. So, it’s been a fun time. There’s a fellow on our engineering staff who’s 82 years old. I said, “Bill, they’re gonna carry us both out of here on a stretcher if we’re lucky.”

I hope to keep going for a while.

krumore@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @rumormill

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