EMBARRASS- The ever-affable meteorologist and local historian Dave Anderson turned his talk on weather and his family’s area history into an impromptu news session during the Sisu Heritage annual meeting on Feb. 25. Ahead of his talk, he worked the crowd at the town hall with a small hand-held video camera, and interviewed Sisu Heritage President Marlin Bjornrud, and then Embarrass Region Fair Association Chair Tana Johnson for a feature story that was set to air on the evening news later that week (go to northernnewsnow.com and search for Sisu Heritage to see the segment).
Anderson has spent the last 31 years as a weatherman on local Duluth television stations, at KBJR/KDLH, although he began his career there as a janitor. Anderson grew up in Ely and attended Vermilion Community College before continuing his education at the University of Minnesota- Duluth, where he got a degree in communications. While in college, he began working as a janitor at Channel 3 News and caught the journalism bug.
“I saw all the behind-the-scenes work,” he said. With his interest piqued, he applied to become part of the floor crew, even though the pay for that job was lower than what he was making as a janitor. He didn’t get that job at Channel 3, but shortly afterwards, was hired on for second janitorial job at Channel 6, where he did get the opportunity to learn the trade and became a full-time employee in 1989.
He got his start as a weather forecaster when the Channel 6 weatherman was having trouble transitioning from the traditional white board and markers that meteorologists used to use to portray their forecasts to a new computerized system.
Fresh out of college, Anderson was ready to step in.
“I became his graphic artist,” he said. “We were a good team.”
Back then, Anderson explained, the television weathermen weren’t actually meteorologists.
“I just read the weather from the wire,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was saying.”
In the early 90s, local news stations started hiring actual meteorologists, and Anderson went back to school for his degree.
“I was signing up for low pay for the rest of my life,” he said. “And I’ll take that.”
Anderson joked that when he learned about the weather in middle school he didn’t understand it. But now he does, and actually teaches meteorology at the Lake Superior College flight school, and he also teaches a broadcast practicum (hands-on) class for Northland College in Ashland.
“One of my students is now a chief meteorologist in Duluth,” he said.
Of course, any visit by a weather person to Embarrass is going to talk about the record winter of 1996, when on Feb. 2, which also happened to be Groundhog’s Day, temperatures were predicted to possibly hit record lows.
“That’s the day the groundhog froze,” said Anderson.
Anderson said they had spotted an arctic cold wave about five days prior that was likely to produce record, or near-record, lows. The question, he said, was who would get the coldest temperature, official temperature recorders Roland “Charlie” Fowler in Embarrass or Kathy Hoppa in rural Tower.
“We went to Kathy’s place,” Anderson said, of the Channel 6 crew, while the weather crews from Channel 3 and 10 went to Embarrass. Anderson traveled up to the area the day before, when the morning low hit -48F, but then headed back to Duluth that evening.
“It’s really hard to do live interviews in that cold,” he said.
As anyone who has followed area weather history knows, the official thermometer in Embarrass hit -52F and then the mercury separated. The official thermometer in Tower hit -59.5F at 9 a.m., which was round down to -60F.
Other thermometers mounted in the weather box in Embarrass showed a low of -64F, and these unofficial thermometers were sent out to be calibrated and were found to be accurate. But the weather service does not recognize those unofficial temperatures.
“It was just the luck of the draw,” said Anderson, who said he enjoyed bringing out this story for his viewers every year on Groundhog Day.
In keeping with the Sisu Heritage’s Finnish roots, Anderson talked about his own family’s Finnish history. His mother was from the Martilla family in Tower, who ran the confectionary and then the drugstore.
Anderson talked about many other television personalities he had worked with over the years, and also talked about the changes in video technology, going from film to tape to SD cards, along with the subsequent changes in camera and battery sizes and weights to the small handheld camera he used today.
Questions from the audience included the obligatory question about this year’s record mild winter, and possible outlook for the summer. Anderson explained as a meteorologist, he was trained to forecast weather up to a week in advance. Climatologists, on the other hand, were the people who looked at longer range forecasts and studied climate change.
Anderson said they were predicting this winter’s Super El Niño would be fading sometime in April, and they were predicting a La Niña pattern for this summer, which could bring cooler and wetter weather.
Whether or not this area will ever see a -60F temperature again is doubtful, he said, due to human-caused warming. But Anderson was not willing to talk about climate change and its impact on our region. “That’s for people above my pay grade,” he said.
“I don’t flip out about climate change,” he said. “Weather is a yin and a yang. There are crests and troughs.” Anderson said he felt that human-caused pollution was aggravating natural changes in the climate.
Anderson said some weather-related problems have been solved, such as acid rain and he noted that the hole in the ozone layer is slowly rebuilding.
Right now, Anderson said, the biggest weather concern is the lack of moisture, and he said the upcoming forecasts were not showing much chance of significant rain or snow.