Tom Skilling

We are fast approaching our country's 250th birthday which has many of us reflecting on just how extraordinary our country is! You ask as you do this, where do I begin in putting the amazing nature of our country into words? This is a country which has done so much to foster its citizens hopes and dreams. Those who have come before us have laid the foundation for the freedom we love and cherish. We can dream here—dream about where we want to take our lives and actually have a chance of making these dreams real.   This sets our country aside from so many others.

If anyone's life has been the realization of a set of dreams becoming reality, it's been mine. There aren't words to express the appreciation I feel nor the intensity with which I wish this for all who walk among us.

I've worked for going on 60 years in the field of meteorology—a field, which like so many other scientific fields in our country, has seen stunning advances.

Hurricanes no longer strike without warning, we're given lifesaving advance warnings of deadly tornadoes and snowstorms. Cold waves and heat waves are predicted sometimes a week or more in advance.

I watched as a young student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 animations of landfalling hurricanes as viewed from satellites on computer monitors. UW Madison was birthplace of satellite meteorology, something which began in the late 1950s under the auspices of Dr. Verner Suomi and his team of talented engineers. Suomi is referred to as the " Father of weather satellites"—for good reason!  He was just that! He had a vision that we could observe and track ever storm and weather system from space—and do so around the clock—day and night! We do that now. We see real time satellite images on our phones, our home computers and televisions. The support and funding of our government made this a reality in the U.S.—and before it happened anywhere else on Earth!

The number of "firsts" for which U.S. entrepreneurs and scientists can take credit in the field of atmospheric science is stunning. These have established our country as a leader in tracking and forecasting the weather and they're truly eye-opening!

Our country was first to develop telegraph relayed weather observations which made weather forecasting possible, the first to establish a system by which ships could relay weather observations  while at sea, the first to launch weather satellites, the first to develop and use computers and computer forecast models to help forecast the weather, the first to use Doppler radar technology to detect and track tornadoes and severe weather, first to deploy buoys to detect and track tsunamis, the first to install terminal doppler radars to detect plane-crash inducing downbursts.  We were also first to establish a 24 hour cable weather channel and pioneered the technology to automatically uplink weather observations without human intervention while aircraft are in flight.

If ever there has been a country on this planet with residents more attuned to or interested in the weather, it's been our country—the United States. Little wonder! The U.S. is arguably home to a wider, more diverse range of impactful weather—

and weather which can change by the minute at times—than any other on the planet.

Scientists in our country have been supported in their studies and research by our government. This has enabled early warning of weather extremes and planning to deal with them.

I simply can't imagine having personally had a more magnificent front row seat to a wider array of stunning array of advances in our understanding of our atmosphere than I've been privileged to have over my career here in the United States. The progress has been fostered by the support of our government's investment in research.  U.S. scientists have led the way, in the creation of ingenious remote sensing meteorological observing and forecasting tools and prediction models.

For more than 45 years, I was chief meteorologist for WGN, produced the Chicago Tribune weather page with my talented team at WGN for 27 years; been able to share a stage with leading scientists and forecasters at my side during our annual spring WGN-TV/Fermilab Tornado and Severe Weather Seminars in Batavia which we presented for 38 years.  And in myriad venues across Chicago area and beyond, I've been honored to speak on meteorological subjects as diverse as lightning, flooding, dust storms, deadly heat & cold waves--including the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995 and the record near 17" flood centered on Aurora, Naperville and Sugar Grove only a year later which produced nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in damage.

Over my career, I've visited melting glaciers and witnessed the Northern Lights in Alaska, investigated and reported on tsunamis there too, flown with the Air Force Reserve crews and earlier with a Navy crew from Jacksonville, Florida into hurricanes and on tropical investigatory flights, traveled to NASA laboratories where earth-observing satellites are built and operated, traveled to the Southwest's Hoover Dam and the worrisomely dwindling water of Lake Mead, our country's largest reservoir.

I've had the honor over the years of working with Nobel Prize winning climate scientist Dr. Don Wuebbles, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign. As a young scientist, Dr. Wuebbles was among the first to draw a connection between chlorofluorocarbon propellants used in aerosol cans for years and the destruction of our UV capturing stratospheric ozone layer. By removing them internationally as set forth in the Montreal Protocol passed internationally in 1987 and suggested less harmful propellants. As a result, our planet's critical ozone is repairing itself and the ozone hole at the South Pole has been diminishing.

I've covered the work of other scientists, like Dr. Seth Darling and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory who are hard at work on the development of new and improved batteries, recycling electric vehicles, the production of cleaner fuels and nuclear reactors for electricity generation and at unlocking the secrets of fusion-energy production—which, if and when realized, offers the potential of a future of unlimited and far cleaner energy production.

As our country approaches its 250th birthday, may my voice be added to the choir of voices celebrating the genius of the scientists in our country who have played key and irreplaceable roles in better understanding and forecasting our weather and advancing science in general. To have been able to observe this in the meteorological and atmospheric disciplines has been and continues to be a joy for me and all who work in my field.  All with whom I've talked over the years count our lucky stars to have been among VERY lucky souls who have been to make a living while pursuing an interest and passion which have been key components of their lives and in the greatest country on the planet.