Minnesota Now meteorologist extravaganza!

CATHY WURZER: Well, the weather today-- decent, finally. Skies are mostly sunny around the region. Temperatures all over the map-- it's 72 in Red Wing, 41 in downtown Duluth. Spring, friends, has been long in coming. Weather forecasting in the state of Minnesota is never a dull moment, or at least, there are few dull moments. It's ever-changing.

The meteorologists here at MPR News together have-- get this-- 150 years of forecasting experience among them all. So we thought, what the heck? Why not put them all together in one conversation?

So we're going to have a meteorologist extravaganza. Here with us are the entire weather team. Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner is with us. Hey.

PAUL HUTTNER: Hey, Cathy. Good to be here. I don't know what we're going to do with five meteorologists. We could have a hurricane in the next 20 minutes.

CATHY WURZER: I love that. Sven Sundgaard, where are you?

SVEN SUNDGAARD: I'm here. Good morning-- I mean afternoon.

CATHY WURZER: It's OK.

SVEN SUNDGAARD: Sorry, I'm normally saying good morning.

CATHY WURZER: Sven's here. Mr. Ron Trenda?

RON TRENDA: Hey, Cathy. When Paul mentioned that five meteorologists, I thought of a joke starting, five meteorologists walked into a bar.

CATHY WURZER: And don't even go there. Bill Endersen-- Bill Endersen is with us.

BILL ENDERSEN: Well, good afternoon.

CATHY WURZER: Hi, Bill. And in my studio, the one and the only, Dr. Mark Seeley, retired climatologist and meteorologist at the U of M-- regular guest on Morning Edition. I think probably of all of you, Mark has the most experience. Would that be right?

MARK SEELEY: I don't know. 45 years and counting, I guess.

SVEN SUNDGAARD: I'm not even that old, so--

CATHY WURZER: Oh, thanks, Sven. Appreciate that.

MARK SEELEY: Rub it in, Sven.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Hey, you know what? First, it's my honor to have worked with each and every one of you at various stages of my career and to have you all together in one place, so thank you. You all are amazing. So I'm going to geek out because you all know that I'm kind of an armchair meteorologist. I wish I could have gone in your direction, but here I am as a news person.

So let's talk about the weather. If you guys had to pick, what's one weather event you've reported on or maybe experienced early on that really stands out to you? Mr. Huttner, since you're the chief, let's start with you.

PAUL HUTTNER: Well, I would have to say, Cathy, that it's the still record and sometimes maligned 1991 Halloween blizzard.

CATHY WURZER: Yes.

PAUL HUTTNER: It's still the single largest snow event in the Twin Cities-- 28.4 inches. Actually, a lot of Minnesota-- Duluth had 36.9 inches. And I was a young meteorologist at WCCO TV back then, and we didn't have a morning show. So we're looking at the maps in the days before-- and Bill Endersen may have been a part of this process.

And we're seeing what looked like 2 inches of liquid. And we're looking at each other going, that's 20 inches of snow. So we tell the news managers. And they're like, OK, Paul, you get the short straw. You come in that morning, and you do a few weather updates.

Well, I wake up. There's 15 inches of snow on the ground. It's 3:30 in the morning. Get in there around 5:00, pile my car into a snowdrift, and trudge into the station. And we did near continuous weather updates between 6:00 AM and the noon hour.

John Lansing was the news manager at the time. He's now the CEO of National Public Radio, by the way. And he says, Paul, I want you to go on the air, and I want you to stay on the air. I want you to turn us into the Weather Channel. So I was the only anchor or meteorologist for TV that made it into the station that morning that was able to.

So I did-- I don't know-- 45, 50 minutes, an hour for the entire morning. And it was funny because they posted the ratings the next day, and we did a 44 share, which is a huge deal in television. Ken Rees says, congrats, Huttner. You're the only person in the history of WCCO TV with their own 40 share.

CATHY WURZER: Wow.

PAUL HUTTNER: And that credit, of course, goes to the storm-- again, just a phenomenal storm and amazing that it's maligned. What's wrong with people? This is the top event of our lifetimes because the Minnesota climate working group has the top five weather events in Minnesota history. And the top two are the Armistice Day blizzard and the Dust Bowl, and those are-- most people weren't around for those. So I hope the younger folks, Cathy, get their own big storm to talk about someday soon.

CATHY WURZER: Bill Endersen, you were at CCO radio, right?

BILL ENDERSEN: Yes, I was.

CATHY WURZER: And you had a piece of this.

BILL ENDERSEN: And that was indeed quite a storm. I've got a whole file of it in here, and I haven't looked through it recently. But it just-- you never forecast two feet of snow. Even in December, you don't forecast two feet of snow.

And that just hit so hard-- so incredibly hard. And it just took so long to clean up. What people forget is that all that snow melted. It just melted away, and then we got another storm later on in the month. And everybody assumed we'd have a record setting winter with all the snow that we'd already had, and that was not the case. It takes a lot of snow to get up to close to 100 inches, which would be our record winter.

CATHY WURZER: So Ron Trenda, were you at KSTP? I'm trying to remember.

RON TRENDA: During that storm, let me think.

CATHY WURZER: I know, right? I'm trying to remember. Where was I? Was I with Trenda, or was I with Huttner? I can't remember.

RON TRENDA: No, I was actually a Channel 9 back then.

CATHY WURZER: OK. OK. That's right. That's right.

RON TRENDA: But yeah, my biggest storm was the dome-buster snowstorm December 10 and 11, 2010. It began on late on the 10th. Heavy snow continued through much of Saturday, December 11. And according to the state climatology office, heavy snow with visibilities of a quarter mile or less was reported at the Twin Cities MSP Airport for eight hours straight from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM on December 11.

And the Twin Cities storm totaled 17.1 inches, and it was windy, too. And that's the highest December snowstorm total in Twin Cities weather records-- fifth highest snowstorm total in the Twin Cities overall.

CATHY WURZER: Wow.

RON TRENDA: And it was memorable for me because I teamed up with another meteorologist in an expanded team they brought in of WCCO TV reporters and anchors for four hours of continuous weather coverage that Saturday morning, additional coverage that afternoon and evening, and then I stayed downtown overnight to anchor the weather the next morning. And our team won-- for that December blizzard coverage, received a regional Emmy award. And most folks remember that the roof of the Metrodome collapsed early Sunday morning, and the Vikings game with the Giants was moved to Detroit and played on Monday.

CATHY WURZER: As a matter of fact, we sent people out here at MPR-- not a surprise, right? So we have this report that we're going to roll from December 30, 19-- oh, this is 1982. Wait a minute now. We might have screwed this up here, you guys.

Let's just-- since the domebuster was in 2010, I don't know-- if this tape is from '82, we're not going to roll it.

BILL ENDERSEN: We did have the-- this is Bill. The Metrodome did collapse in the blizzard at the end of December 1982.

CATHY WURZER: Oh. See, now this is a good-- guys know these things. Roll that little bit of audio there. Go ahead.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Snow removal continues around the Metrodome, at least on the ground. No word of crews on top as stadium officials this morning had no word on either the cause of the tear or what they would do to repair. They were to hold a press conference late morning to describe for reporters the extent of the damage.

Meantime, the scoreboard in front of the stadium continued to announce the Vikings versus Cowboys game scheduled for Monday night, January 3. In Minneapolis, this is Dan Olson reporting.

[END PLAYBACK]

CATHY WURZER: Oh, poor Dan Olson. We sent him out there. Yikes.

BILL ENDERSEN: Cathy, if I can just touch on that storm really briefly, 16 and 1/2 inches of snow fell. And that almost all fell overnight. I got up in the morning to 15 inches on the ground. I had to try to get to WCCO downtown. The car wasn't going anyplace.

I packed a backpack of survival gear and set off on foot. Finally, a nice man with a truck with a high ground clearance picked me up and dropped me off at the station. But there were peak winds of 44 miles an hour at MSP. But no blizzard warning was issued because at that time, the temperature had to be, I think it was, about 20 or colder. But the temperatures were up in the 20s, so they didn't issue a blizzard warning.

People didn't know what was coming. But right after that storm, the temperature criterion was dropped. Now a blizzard only depends on wind and visibility.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Hey, Sven, when you look back at your career, what was the big one for you?

SVEN SUNDGAARD: Well, I remember all those, too. And I must say, the Halloween blizzard, I was 10, and that was an awful year for trick-or-treating. It was one of my last years. Yeah.

No, but for me, it was my time in Duluth-- another snow event. I've never still seen anything quite like this. It was the December 31, 2004 to January 1, 2005 New Year's storm, which affected a lot of the state. But it really just got a big boost of energy from Lake Superior, of course.

We had, for about three or four hours-- when I say zero visibility, I've never seen where I couldn't see my hand in front of me. It was like that. I was at KBJR News in Canal Park there, and you would stand on the sidewalk. You could hear cars go by. You couldn't even see their headlights. The snow was so heavy.

And frequent lightning and thunder-- like, every 30 seconds. It was just unreal. We ended up with about 10 inches of snow, but most of that fell just in about a three-hour period between 6:30 and 9:30 PM. I had to walk home that night from the station, needless to say. I had a '92 Chevy Cavalier at the time with almost no clearance, so there was no hope with those hills in Duluth.

CATHY WURZER: No kidding. And Mark Seeley, your big winter storm?

MARK SEELEY: July 23, 1987-- one of my most embarrassing moments. We had out-of-state visitors, and it was a hot, humid day. And there were thunderstorms in the forecast.

And my wife said, well, maybe we shouldn't be taking them downtown Saint Paul to the science museum. It looks a little threatening out there. And I said, oh, no, it'll be OK. So we all went downtown, and we got stranded downtown.

10 inches of rain in six hours-- at one time, it was raining with an intensity of 3 inches per hour. And of course, it closed most of the interstate system and the highways, and we had to navigate back towards the Saint Paul campus on Como Avenue, which was like driving upstream in a riverbed. It was unbelievable amounts of rainfall that I-- of course, the extremes is what we all miss. I think everybody will agree on that.

Like somebody said, you don't forecast two feet of snow. Well, you don't forecast 10 inches of rain in six hours. That just doesn't happen.

CATHY WURZER: Right. '87-- oh, I was upstairs with Gary Eichten. And that was the only time I've ever been in a newsroom where the water was coming in through the window.

[LAUGHTER]

I thought to myself, OK, I think this is a big one. Yeah. And Eichten was on the air for hours and hours and hours. Yeah, that was a mess.

MARK SEELEY: A heck of a deal.

CATHY WURZER: I know. It was a heck of a deal. It really was. And I think my car floated back home to-- I was living in southeast Minneapolis at the time. You guys, I'm going to take a quick break for the news. I think Mr. John Wanamaker is sitting by with a look at a newscast after this.

So we're going to go back to our meteorologist Lollapalooza here that we have with the weather guys. So if you're just joining us, we have every weather person on staff in with us right now. It's kind of a rare event. Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner is here, Sven Sundgaard, Ron Trenda, Bill Endersen Mark Seeley-- just a who's who in the weather world.

So gentlemen, I want to know-- there is so much scientific and historical knowledge in this room right now, including the history of various weather departments at various Twin Cities broadcast stations between all of us. Paul Huttner-- and guys, you can chime in, too-- is there something about Minnesota that has led our stations-- our radio and TV stations-- to invest so heavily in weather, in meteorology?

PAUL HUTTNER: That's a great question, Cathy, and I think there is. And I think what it is, is that Minnesotans are tuned to the weather. They're weather-obsessed. I mean, I think Kelly said that the weather is basically trying to kill us here about 30 to 60 days a year, so we pay attention.

And we have such a rich history in broadcast meteorology. This is what got me excited about weather growing up in Minnesota was these supersized weather teams that some of the broadcast outlets in the '70s, even '80s and '90s. KSTP TV had a big group of meteorologists-- remember, Dr. Walt Lyons, people like Dennis Feltgen.

WCCO, when I worked there, when I finally got in the game from '88 to '94, we had a staff of eight people-- five for TV. Mike Fairbourne, Bud Kraehling, who I adore-- he was my mentor-- Rebecca Kolls, Matt Baylow, myself. And then on the radio side, Bill Endersen, Mike Lynch, and Karen Filloon-- a pioneering woman in broadcast meteorology. So just amazing the kind of station meteorologists we've had-- a lot of names over time.

And I know Ron worked at KSTP. Dave Dahl-- a bunch of other people there, too. Right, Ron?

RON TRENDA: Yeah, Dave and I were hired the same week back in 1977. A blast from the past.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, my gosh. Which leads us to Mark Seeley, who's here. So what brought you here? And then you're now, like, the fabric. You're like the Mount Rushmore of Minnesota weather.

MARK SEELEY: Well, it was a fluke. Red Barber passed away in 1992. He was a regular on Morning Edition with Bob Edwards. In fact, Bob Edwards took a sabbatical to write the book Fridays with Red.

CATHY WURZER: That's right.

MARK SEELEY: And for some reason, MPR wanted to keep up some kind of a chat piece just before 7 o'clock on Friday mornings. So I got invited down by Bruce MacDonald, who was managing Morning Edition back then, just to have a chat with Bob Potter. And I don't know. I guess Paul's absolutely right.

Chatting with somebody about our weather history, about our weather impacts, about our weather records is just resonant with all kinds of citizens all over the state. And so I've been coming in ever since then. And really, it's been-- that's what gave me a great-- it amplified my love for Minnesota's weather history in the first place, which has a deep, rich weather history in this state. There's no if, ands, or buts about it. We're right in the middle of the North American continent, so we can experience anything.

CATHY WURZER: Which just makes it fun, right, Bill Endersen and Sven Sundgaard?

BILL ENDERSEN: Oh, yes. It's a fun place to do weather. I started a KSTP somewhat after Ron did. I had known Dr. Walt Lyons through some air pollution work, and they needed somebody to do some occasional fill-in.

So I would come in and maybe write forecasts overnight and do-- we had to do our graphics then on paper. And if I got them done early, there was a guy that showed movies on KSTP-TV at the same time, and they'd often get gaps between the movies. And he'd say, Bill, if you got some time between movies, can we talk weather for about five or 10 minutes?

And I went in there on a broken down couch, and that's how I got my introduction to broadcasting. Now meteorologists go to college and take courses in journalism and broadcasting. And I haven't had any of those.

CATHY WURZER: It's OK because you're one of the best. Weren't you with Northwest Airlines in aviation meteorology?

BILL ENDERSEN: Yes, after I left WCCO, I spent 10 years doing aviation forecasting. And that's a very specific kind of forecasting-- not the general ones we do for the public on the radio. We're doing big areas. But we're doing hour by hour, very specific forecasts for airports around the world for flight departure and arrival times.

And I mean, all around the world, we were doing forecasts from right here in Minnesota. Most of our time was spent in forecasting turbulence aloft because there's a lot of turbulence up there, but we know how it forms. And we don't want you to be knocked out of your seat when the plane flies over Greenland and hits a Greenland wave in the middle of the night. That's the kind of stuff we have to forecast. We'll be telling a pilot, you need to go up 2,000 feet to get out of that. That's tricky stuff.

CATHY WURZER: But fun, though. Say, Sven, how did you get involved in this business?

SVEN SUNDGAARD: Boy, it was early '90s. It wasn't the Halloween blizzard, but it was actually kind of-- when I look back on it now, it was really the beginning of climate change or being noticeable, I think, because we all grew up skiing in my family. My dad was in the Olympics for ski jumping.

I was not Olympic material. That's why I'm here today. But it was really kind of the first of these winters that stuck out, where we just were not getting snow. And it was very mild. Really, since then, on a regular schedule, we have these very mild winters.

And that's what got me into it because I was like, well, where's the snow? And why, watching some of the people on TV, are they forecasting a storm that doesn't pan out? So I got really interested in just how you forecast and how the atmosphere works that way. It wasn't a traumatic tornado event or anything like that.

And then once I got it, I think, like most meteorologists, you're just hooked. Once that clicks in your brain, there's no going back. So yeah.

CATHY WURZER: Going-- go ahead, Bill.

BILL ENDERSEN: Well, just to throw in real quickly, Sven mentioned the milder winters. It strikes me that our winters have gotten tremendously warmer at night during my adult lifetime-- that short period of time. In the '70s when I moved here, it was not uncommon to go into the-- well into the minus 20s at least a few times during the winter. That barely made the news.

And that just doesn't happen very much anymore. The coldest we had in the Twin Cities this past winter was 13 below. The coldest we had the previous winter was 17 below. We almost never set record low temperatures, especially during the cold part of the year. Mark Seeley, of course, knows a lot more about this than I do. I'm not a climatologist, but I've experienced this warming just in my adult lifetime.

CATHY WURZER: Mark.

MARK SEELEY: Yeah, it's phenomenal, Bill. You're quite right. In fact, that's one of the most striking trends. All of the research from the American Meteorological Society as well as the American Association of State Climatologists shows that for Minnesota and Wisconsin, the overnight minimum temperatures are warming at twice the pace of the daytime maximums. This is very unique, Cathy, by the way, to our Great Lakes geography. That kind of trend is not as emphatic in other parts of the nation.

CATHY WURZER: And how is climate change making it tough for you folks to forecast? Because I mean, really, the trends are all over the map. Right?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PAUL HUTTNER: If I can jump in on that one, Cathy, the jet stream may be changing. There's some science, some evidence-- it's still kind of young science-- that this Arctic amplification-- the warming of the Arctic area is twice or three times as fast as the equator area, slowing down the jet stream and making it more loopy. That shows up in the daily weather maps. It may even be showing up in the seasons.

We've had a trend for about 10 years of our late winter, early spring periods getting colder and snowier in Minnesota. And so is that spilling over? Are the seasons slowing down, also? I mean, fall and winter are getting warmer. Fall is the second fastest warming season in Minnesota after winter. So it's still-- we don't know the full effects of how climate change and changing temperature patterns around the globe are affecting the jet stream and the daily weather that we have to forecast every day.

CATHY WURZER: You mentioned seasons, my friend. And of course, we're entering peak severe weather season. What's the craziest storm that you guys have forecast? Now, of course, I'm known in the newsroom as being a person who really likes severe weather, which I know sounds-- that's a little nutty on my part. But I get excited when severe weather warnings are issued because I like storms. But what's the craziest storm you guys have forecast?

PAUL HUTTNER: Well, for me, just quickly. I do vividly remember the North Minneapolis tornado on May 22 of 2011. I was on the air when that storm began to produce damage in Saint Louis Park around 394 and Highway 100 and doing updates here on Minnesota Public Radio as it moved into North Minneapolis. I remember hailstones with that warning-- people to drive underneath an overpass.

And it just so turned out that Bill Kling, the president of MPR, was in that area and drove under an underpass and avoided the hail. That was weird. But that's one of the storms I remember in more recent times.

SVEN SUNDGAARD: That was the storm I was going to mention, too. And I was at KARE 11 at the time and went in early that day because we knew something was going to blow up, potentially. And I know most of the broadcasters can relate. I don't even know if stations have the old red phone anymore, but I remember the red phone ringing.

And it was Todd Krause at the Weather Service saying, there's a tornado crossing 394 and 100. And I thought-- said words I can't say on radio. And that was-- what-- multiple hours of covering this storm that unfortunately killed people. And yeah, it really sticks out in my mind.

And it missed my house at the time by about a block or two. So at the same time, I'm texting my neighbors, wondering, is everything still there? It was really crazy.

It took out some really big, old trees in Theo Wirth. That's when the tornado really started to intensify. And then, of course, it just really railed through North Minneapolis.

CATHY WURZER: That's right. I remember that.

RON TRENDA: Yeah. And there were multiple severe weather events when I was at KSTP in the early '80s. And in case, Cathy, you were asking about that snowstorm-- the one Bill was talking about-- I was indeed at KSTP during that one.

CATHY WURZER: That's what I thought.

RON TRENDA: But at the time, we had the only Doppler in town. KSTP-TV had the only Doppler in town and one of only two commercial ones in the country. And for that reason, the Weather Service would call us and ask if they should be issuing a warning on multiple occasions, so that was a very memorable time.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, my gosh.

PAUL HUTTNER: Wow.

CATHY WURZER: Mark Seeley-- and maybe the other guys can chime in, too. I know you all get a lot of grief from people when you cut in and do weather warnings and that kind of thing sometimes, especially on TV. It bears mentioning-- would you agree, Mark Seeley-- that folks should not rely on sirens for the weather warnings.

MARK SEELEY: No. In fact, we have a rich and profuse severe weather observing network that's deployed under the threat of severe weather. We got spotters out that are deployed to the appropriate areas when we're under the threat. And that is hugely valuable because a Doppler, in fact, doesn't catch everything. And so that's very, very important.

It's also very important to make sure you have access to some communication system that's going to inform you, whether it's NOAA weather radio or a phone app or something, because as Paul said earlier, there's probably a number of days every year where the weather literally threatens to kill us. And you need to be well-informed. That's a given in this state, for sure.

CATHY WURZER: Gentlemen, comment?

SVEN SUNDGAARD: I would just say, we kind of curse social media and phones, but I do think that's really helped, especially reaching younger people in terms of severe weather. So you'll be with a group of friends, and everybody's phone goes off at the same time when there's a tornado warning issued for your part of the county.

And so that's really sort of a game-changer because of course, people aren't watching TV anymore, or they're not outside relying on the tornado sirens. But it is surprising how many people still will say, oh, I didn't hear the sirens. They still rely on that, some people.

CATHY WURZER: But we also should say, too-- don't you think, Bill Endersen-- that people-- you have to get the right information. I mean, just a garden variety weather app is not going to really give you what you need.

BILL ENDERSEN: Yeah. Right. As a communicator, as a broadcaster, you have to be clear. The Weather Service uses, of course, the apps, but also NOAA weather radio, which is what I rely on in our house. But time is of the essence. The average forward speed of a tornado in this part of the country is about 35 miles per hour.

That means it covers one mile to your house in less than two minutes, so you can't stand there and just say, well, when it crosses the street in front of the house, then we'll go to the basement. The biggest mistake people make with storms, and also just with lightning, is not taking shelter soon enough. That's what kills people from lightning. Out on lakes, they forget how long it takes to get a boat to shore and up the boat landing dock.

CATHY WURZER: Final word here, Mr. Paul Huttner?

PAUL HUTTNER: Yeah, I just want to thank this team. I think we have the best weather team in Minnesota. I've learned so much from Mark Seeley about climate. Thank you, Mark.

Bill taught me some of my chops way back in the day. Thank you, Bill. And Ron and Sven, you guys are so knowledgeable and the best to work with. Our audience is just so lucky to have you, also. I am speaking from a place of gratitude. Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: And I would chime right in, Paul Huttner, because I just-- I love all of you guys. It's been so much fun working with you over all these years, each and every one of you in different stations. And now I get to work with all of you again here at MPR News. And you all do an amazing job. And together, you're just a powerful force. Yeah.

PAUL HUTTNER: Thank you. You're the best, too, Cathy. You said it yourself, sure. You know a lot about weather.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah, but here's the deal, you guys. I've learned from each and every one of you. As I say, I'm an armchair meteorologist.

SVEN SUNDGAARD: You know a lot. That's what I like.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah, I try.

SVEN SUNDGAARD: Keep us on our toes.

CATHY WURZER: OK, you guys, I'm going to go raise some money. Mark Seeley, it's fun to see you in studio.

MARK SEELEY: Yes, it's nice to be face to face again. And I second what everybody says. Listeners out there, I know, during pledge drives, it's a little bit of a test for you. But you should be very, very pleased, especially if you're a member of the MPR community, because I agree with Paul wholeheartedly. You have the best team of meteorologists in the region, providing you with meaningful information as well as education about the weather.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah, I agree. All right. Gentlemen, I'm going to run. Thank you so much.

PAUL HUTTNER: Thanks, everybody.

RON TRENDA: Thanks, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: Paul Huttner, Sven Sundgaard, Ron Trenda, Bill Endersen, and the one and only Dr. Mark Seeley.

SPEAKER 1: Programming is supported by the McKnight Foundation, advancing a more just, creative, and abundant future, where people and planet thrive. Online at mcknight.org.

CATHY WURZER: All right, where are we? It's 12:55. Hey, Kelly Gordon, you weather geek. Did you have a good time?

KELLY GORDON: Oh, my gosh. I am completely geeking out. And Cathy, I don't think I'm giving anything away here. They were not kidding. You have so much weather information. I think that both of us, being fellow weather geeks, kind of had that-- I kind of wanted to be, in another life, a meteorologist.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, I did.

KELLY GORDON: I just love the weather, and it's so interesting. And I also get that quiet thrill when there's a storm coming. My family knows that I'm pulling up the radar. And I'm like, look at all the colors there.

And they're like, yeah, I know. I know, Mom. And I think that right now what we should do is if people are listening and they loved that as much as we did, this is your time to call. And I'm going to say, we got this comment from Christopher in Minneapolis, and I love this so much, Cathy. Listen to this.

This is a special donation on top of my sustaining membership as I love MPR Weather and Minnesota Now. No other radio station has the breadth and depth of meteorologists and climatologists that MPR has, and Friday mornings would not be the same without Cathy--