GEORGE WALDENBERGER waldenberger@kjrh.com I'm going to go ahead and say this right away, I like snow. From blizzards to flurries...I think it's all great. But we don't get a lot of powder in Green Country. We do, however, have some of the most exciting weather in the world! Thunderstorms, heat waves, cold snaps, ice storms, and floods along with a little snow on the side all keep my job here very challenging.
I grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm with 10 brothers and sisters. I always liked math, so engineering seemed like a good career path to take. After a double major in engineering and geology, it was time for my first taste of the real world. I did the grunt work at an engineering firm that designed foundations for skyscrapers in New York City. It sounds interesting, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind for a career.
That's why I left for UCLA, where I ran hurricane and winter storm simulations with computer models. We took the biggest winter storm of the century, and tried to make the blasted thing even bigger! The project even funded my master's degree in atmospheric science. When funding was tight, however, I worked as a Teaching Assistant for Chemistry 20A - Chemical Structure. It was a demanding job teaching classrooms of very bright young scientists at UCLA. On the side I worked as a weather producer at KTLA, as a DJ for UCLA Radio , and I was the king of weekend road trips.
After that, KMEG-TV called from Sioux City, Iowa. I moved there for my first on-air gig as a meteorologist, reporter and part-time weather wizard. When August 2007 rolled around, I jumped in the Blue Beast and drove down to Tulsa. It was all for an amazing opportunity to forecast Green Country weather with Dan, Julie, and another guy named George.
Since then we've all been through a lot. We manned the controls around the clock during December 2007's infamous ice storm. We covered an early May tornado outbreak in 2008 nonstop as one of the tornadoes moved through Picher. We even worked through a snowstorm that dropped 10” of snow in March 2009-that's more than we typically see in an entire winter!
Let's see what this winter has in store for us. We're ready.
Feel free to
drop me an email...we can talk about the weather, or anything else under the moon.
