Lake Erie Lives
Florida and Arizona may be tempting once the snow starts piling up. But places like those are the bane of a good forecaster’s career. No, a true weather lover goes where the weather goes. That’s how Don Paul ended up in Buffalo.
“I always liked the idea of working in an area that gets challenging weather,” says the New Jersey native, who has been at New York’s WIVB News 4 for 24 years.
Paul knew Buffalo was his kind of place when he returned home from covering his first big winter storm here, back in January 1985. The snow let up that evening on his street in the suburb of Amherst, “and all the garage doors were open, all the children on that cul-de-sac were up, everyone’s got charcoal barbecues going, and they’re having a party. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this place is going to be great.’”
It was good family fun, Paul remembers. Toddlers and little ones, up way past their bedtime, played in a foot and a half of snow while the adults shared burgers and maybe a beer or two. It was a welcome introduction to the neighborhood, and to the Buffalonian culture.
Good or bad, walloping snow or gentle breeze, Paul eats it up. To forecast weather in Buffalo is to embrace Lake Erie in all its weather-changing glory. And the fun starts now.
While we’re clamoring for those last, lovely Indian summer days, Don Paul will be hungrily awaiting the upcoming winter, wondering how malevolent, tumultuous and unexpected the storms will be.
“Autumn is so beautiful,” he says. “It’s the season of anticipation.” First comes the lake-effect rain. Then, the lake-effect snow.
Paul’s eagerness is saturated with the innocence and joy of a kid on Christmas morning: “How much snow are we going to get?” he wonders. “Am I going to be really busy? Gee, I hope so!”
In Buffalo, as on the southern and eastern sides of all the Great Lakes, the lake effect isn’t just something that happens every once in a while; it’s a daily regulator, as likely a friend as a foe. Weather has to cross the lake before it gets here — and that giant obstacle can cause a whole lot of change. You see, while it’s lake effect that dumps those famed snow piles into the city each winter, it’s also what provides the cloudless, low-humidity summer days Buffalonians sometimes take for granted.
On warm days, the lake is cooler than the air, so it’s able to absorb much of the energy from the winds overhead. The result is fewer clouds and generally less furnace-blast heat than in a city such as Cleveland. The weather hits residents there before the lake has had much of a chance to cool things down.
During the winter, the air masses moving east over Lake Erie are able to build in strength as they pick up water vapor off the surface of the lake, crafting storms that have no qualms about thrashing the city. It’s no surprise then that Buffalo gets more lake-effect snow than any large city in the United States.
All of that makes the job great, but not easy. Paul can read the sophisticated Doppler radar, analyze the winds inside a thunderstorm cell and take a heck of a good shot at pinpointing where, precisely, the lake-effect storms are going to hit. But if he’s off, his entire viewing population will have to deal with the erroneous calculations.
“If your wind forecast is off by five degrees, you can warn the wrong 200,000 people and leave out the right 200,000 people,” he says.
That’s what’s known in weather-forecaster lingo as a “busted forecast.”
Paul’s most memorable mistake was in October 2006, when he, along with other area forecasters, had predicted light snow. The actual weather, seemingly sent from Thor himself: storms and high winds that downed thousands of tree limbs and left hundreds of thousands without power. The veteran weatherman was somber, to say the least.
“The next day, the Weather Channel came up and interviewed me,” says Paul. “A friend of mine there told me it almost looked like I was crying.”
Weather’s important to Don Paul. It was important to him as a 7-year-old watching TV weathercasters foretell the mighty Nor’easters coming up the eastern seaboard, and that fascination has never waned.
“When I was a little kid,” he says, “I used to pretend to be a TV weatherman. I remember doing my own weathercast, talking about storms.” When he became an on-air weatherman, he found it all came naturally to him — the banter, the ad hoc way of delivering a forecast. Now, as an elder statesman, Paul is approached by kids, high-schoolers, even adults, who tell him that he’s the reason they love weather.
“It makes me feel old,” he says, “but it makes me feel good.”