Michael Staudenmaier Jr. is meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in Las Vegas. Since a young age, Staudenmaier has been big into weather.
Friday, May 8, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Michael Staudenmaier Jr.’s job title is “meteorologist in charge,” which makes him sound omnipotent, Zeus-like or at least like he has the number for Zeus’ private cell phone, the one he carries even when he’s a lustful swan.
But know that such are not the type of powers granted by the National Weather Service.
Staudenmaier runs (as of February) the weather service’s Las Vegas office, one of 122 such offices in the country. The Las Vegas office employs 22 people and — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — at least two meteorologists are always on hand to monitor Las Vegas for weather emergencies.
Weather emergencies? In Las Vegas?
“I always get that line, that I moved to ‘a place with no weather,’ but, actually, there’s a lot going on in Las Vegas,” Staudenmaier says.
Flash floods, for instance, kill people, as does the summer heat. It’s Staudenmaier’s job, and the job of those he manages, to forearm people with knowledge that they can use to protect their property or save their lives.
Another aspect of Las Vegas’ weather that appeals to Staudenmaier, from a scientific standpoint, is that it is in many ways the “bull’s-eye of change toward warm temperatures over the last 30 years.” Global warming and climate change, in other words. It’s a field in which Staudenmaier is well versed, having developed a training program for weather service employees that won an award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the weather service.
Staudenmaier, 39, joined the National Weather Service after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a master’s degree in atmospheric science.
Before that, he grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, which gave him an early interest in the weather. “You make hay when the sun is shining — that’s a saying because it’s true.” And he saw some good Wisconsin weather — brick walls blown over, tennis-ball-sized hail. When he graduated as the valedictorian of his high school class, people urged him to pursue engineering or medicine, but Staudenmaier knew different.
He was a weather man.
As such, he has been in for occasional derision. People jeer and ask him how it feels to be wrong all the time, which is simply not correct, Staudenmaier says. The weather service’s forecast is accurate 85 to 90 percent of the time. Also, people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the future. They want to know what the exact temperature will be in the future or, yes or no, if it will rain.
The future does not work that way. Do you know what your bank balance will be, to the penny, next week or next month? No, but your educated guess for a week from now will be closer to the truth than your guess for a month from now.
People heckle, Staudenmaier says, because they care. That’s one of the nicer parts of his career.
“You go to a party, everyone’s talking about the weather. Everyone has a story about the weather, some cool thing they saw when they were a kid,” Staudenmaier says.
“Who doesn’t talk about the weather?”
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