#Weatherman jim cantore how to

'I take weather pretty serious,' Cantore says. How can I communicate this message? My tone? Are people going to all of a sudden go, holy shit, he is serious! Maybe I need to pay attention.' 'If there is a big weather outbreak, it's like game day. 'My job is to explain the facts to the public,' he says, sailing through a red light. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'Ĭantore pulls out of the lot and speeds down a road outside The Weather Channel's Atlanta headquarters. 'Screw it,' he says after a beat, then wads up the paper and tosses it out the window. Cantore squints at the ticket, snarls slightly. But mostly he is really annoyed about the parking ticket he now clutches in his hand. Nor is he particularly psyched about being asked to bring the perky persona (wearing a dress shirt no less) that viewers expect from morning hosts. He started his career at 22 on the dawn shift, a brutal schedule he was happy to trade in for intimate brushes with hostile weather events-and now it's sinking in he will need to start rising again at 3 a.m. It's a couple of weeks before the Boston blizzard, and Cantore has just finished several hours of morning-show rehearsal. 'What the?' he mutters, craning a thick arm out and around the windshield, stretching to pluck the citation like he would an errant weed. Enough to make you wonder what keeps Cantore going.Ĭantore is clambering into his Toyota Tacoma when he spies the yellow ticket tucked under the left wiper blade. Even for Thundersnow Jim, that kind of grind could just get. That, lumped together with all he has seen and experienced-the devastation of Katrina and Sandy, the constant moving toward things everyone else is running away from-can seem thrilling and energizing, but also something more. That would begin a stretch in which he would, over a period of a couple of weeks, make it home for just one twenty-four-hour period, after which he would fly to Virginia Tech to film a segment, then immediately catch another flight to Massachusetts for yet another onslaught of snow. He wound up making his predawn debut from the streets of Boston, where he was reporting on a blizzard that dumped more than two feet of snow. In late January, Cantore joined mainstay Sam Champion as coanchor of AMHQ, the newly revamped morning show that is The Weather Channel's most watched program. His presence is so synonymous with severe weather that Weather Channel president David Clark jokingly calls him 'the face of impending doom.'

#Weatherman jim cantore how to

Cantore knows this, and for the past three decades he has made a living advising people when and how to cope with myriad unfortunate circumstances, often from the site of the disaster. Outside of television, in the realm where people have to find their way to work in twenty-five inches of snow or deal with the sudden absence of their roof, the weather can seem less beguiling. 'Look, on a sunny day, when nothing is going on, I'm not your guy.' Mere hours after his latest thundersnow histrionics, the channel was already featuring the footage in an ad as its slogan, 'It's amazing out there,' floated onscreen.

Thundersnow Jim is something of a television phenomenon, someone whose gyrations have made him so beloved to millions of television and weather watchers that over the past decade he has become the face of The Weather Channel. To watch Cantore in this sort of rapture is to watch a man bursting with an ecstasy so complete you begin to feel a bit embarrassed, like you've caught him unawares in the throes of passion, a man liquefied and consumed, his very being blown to particles by the weather equivalent of the money shot. One video clip, captured in February in Plymouth, Massachusetts, shows Cantore's ice-slathered face looking momentarily stunned when lightning flashes amid the snowflakes, then he begins screaming, 'You gotta be kidding me! Yes! Yes! Yes! You can have your $500 million jackpot in Powerball or whatever the heck it was, but I'll take this, baby!' while he leaps and attaboy-pumps his arms. There may, in fact, be nothing anyone in this vast universe loves more than Jim Cantore loves thundersnow-which, as the name suggests, is the simultaneous appearance of two distinct meteorological features, a phenomenon that takes place in just 0.07 percent of all storms. There is nothing in this vast universe that meteorologist Jim Cantore loves more than thundersnow.