MADISON, Wisc. — It was 1970. Tom Skilling was a meteorology major at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Louis Uccellini was among his student group in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences program.
When Uccellini left his long island home in 1968, headed for Wisconsin, he had no idea where the road would take him.
He was never interested in broadcasting – instead, he had a keen mind for research. Skilling’s fellow classmate and lifelong friend rose through the ranks and ultimately headed our nation’s premier weather service – a position he took on back in 2013 and held until retiring at the end of 2021.
Now that Uccellini has a little more time on his hands, he and Skilling hit the road and headed back to a place near and dear to both of them five decades after they left. It’s also where some significant meteorological science was born. And thanks to Uccellini, the technology developed has become a fundamental component of our global observing system.
As kids, Skilling and then Uccellini were both captivated by winter storms. And as college students, a gravitational pull led them to Madison.
In the mid-20th-century, atmospheric science was brewing like a spring thunderstorm in at UW-Madison. UW scientist Dr Verner Suomi wanted to observe weather from space. He developed early instruments that were part of the payload on Explorer 7, a rocket launched back in 1959. After multiple upgrades — and a few more missions in orbit — satellite meteorology was born in the middle of the Dairy State.
“Arguably what has gone on (UW Madison’s) campus has revolutionized the whole field of meteorology,” Skilling said.
“And we were here at the right time,” Uccellini said.
Uccellini and Skilling did the bulk of their studies at the university’s Space Science and Engineering Center. And it’s where some of today’s real-time data are processed and distributed to researchers and forecasters all over the world.
“(It) is the birthplace of satellite meteorology which has just revolutionized the whole field of meteorology,” Skilling said. “I mean it is amazing. And Louis integrated the data sets from this into computer models which help forecast the weather.”
“We came in here and we actually worked the plotting of the data, the analysis of the data, upper air data, cross-sections,” Uccellini said. “And this is the way you started seeing the atmosphere — doing everything by hand. It was absolutely incredible.”
The Director of the National Weather Service is tasked with building better, faster computational weather models. In his 13 years at the agency, and in the years prior that he spent at NASA, the now 72-year-old helped advance the hard science. But for Uccellini, it was also about the people.
“That’s a service that touches everybody in the country every day, and people have come to rely on it for their safety,” he said.”There’s a recognition that just providing a forecast and a warning is not enough. People’s lives depend on it.”
He calls it the weather-ready nation program and it’s a benchmark of his public service.
“Now they are mobilizing in front of landfalling hurricanes a week before to the day of landfall and then beyond,” he said. “It’s remarkable to see how this evolved.”
