Everything You Always Wanted to Know About...
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Fairbanks Museum’s “Weather Guys” (...and we’re not afraid to ask!)
If you listen to Vermont Public Radio or Magic 97.7, or if you read the Caledonian-Record, the Times-Argus, or the Rutland Herald, you are probably familiar with the weather forecasts from the team at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium here in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. From the literal depths of the museum on Main Street -- they are in the basement -- meteorologists Mark Breen, Steve Maleski, and Chris Bouchard research, digest, and disseminate weather data every day, developing forecasts that reach listeners and readers across Vermont and as far away as Montreal, Maine, and Massachusetts.
And when you spend a while with them down in the Fairbanks Weather Center, you find three men who live and breathe what’s happening in the skies above us. Ironic that their lair has but one tiny window, and somehow they know more about what’s happening outdoors than the rest of us ever could!
Chris Bouchard is the “new kid on the block.” A 2005 graduate of Lyndon State College’s celebrated meteorology program, he joined the team almost 4 years 
ago. Chris credits his interest in the weather to a movie he saw in high school -- “Twister,” about tornado chasers. While he allows that tornadoes are not too likely here in northeast Vermont, there is plenty of severe weather in our neck of the woods to interest him. In fact, Chris has become fascinated by lightning storms, and an exhibition of his photographs of lightning is on display at the Fairbanks’ Weather Center.
Chris says that one of the trickiest parts of his job at first was the radio broadcast. “I did the LSC television weather forecasts in college,” he says, “and I had to adjust to radio, where you can’t rely on visual aids of any kind -- no maps, no pictures, no numbers on the screen. We really have to make the weather come alive, just by our words.”
While Chris handles much of the weather duties during the week, Steve Maleski is the guy for the weekends. Steve was the Fairbanks’ original weather forecaster at the start of the VPR radio broadcasts in 1981. Another graduate of LSC’s meteorology program, Steve left Vermont to join the then-new Weather Channel in Atlanta in 1982, but returned two years later to the Fairbanks’ new Northern New England Weather Center. According to Steve, “Franklin Fairbanks, the founder of the Fairbanks Museum, was always a weather enthusiast. Today’s weather programs stem from Franklin’s interest in weather as part of the natural world.” Even today, they send monthly weather observations to the National Weather Service, as has been done since the museum’s founding.
Steve and Chris agree that the sheer volume of information about the weather adds challenges to the forecasting process. “Computer modeling has gotten so sophisticated and so extensive,” says Steve, “that a key part of our job is to figure out what information is the most important and most accurate, and build our forecasts from that.”
The third member of the team, Mark Breen, handles early morning weather forecasts (starting at 3:30 AM!), but the 
other half of his day is devoted to education and astronomy. Mark is the Senior Meteorologist and Director of the Fairbanks Museum’s Planetarium. Like Chris and Steve, Mark learned about meteorology from the LSC program. But astronomy is another story altogether. “I’ve been fascinated by the stars since I came to work at the museum in 1982,” says Mark. “I love everything about science, but the stars and planets have a special appeal. It’s partly the mythology aspect and the storytelling that interests me. Mostly, I’m drawn to the idea that the ancients studied the very same stars we still view today.”
In Mark’s “Night Sky” daily features on Vermont Public Radio, he talks about objects everyone can see in the sky without a telescope. “I want people to learn about what they’re looking at when they gaze up into the sky, and help them answer the question, ‘What is that bright spot I see?’”
In fact, people are always asking questions of these three meteorologists. The team receives calls, letters, and emails every day from readers and listeners. Sometimes people want a specific weather forecast for an upcoming event, and sometimes they want to know what they can see in the night sky. Not unexpectedly, people are often disappointed with the forecast and want to let the group know about it. “We get lots of mail from people who think we’re not forecasting exactly for their specific town,” says Chris. “But when you cover as wide an area as we do, you can’t treat any town as the center of the forecast.”
Of course, in our town we know where the weather really comes from -- the Eye on the Sky weather team in the Fairbanks Museum, right in the middle of St. Johnsbury, Vermont!
