Weathering It All

Last year, the Scalia Laboratory for Atmospheric Analysis celebrated 40 years of providing weather forecasting services for Ohio University and the surrounding community. From its home in Clippinger Laboratories, undergraduate students can gain hands-on experience with real-time forecasting—and in fact earned OHIO the StormReady University designation from the National Weather Service in Charleston, West Virginia, this year in recognition of their efforts to warn the public of hazardous weather. The lab also offers research space for both undergraduate and graduate students and conducts community outreach at local schools and in partnership with the National Weather Service (NWS).

While Scalia Lab was officially founded in 1984, its roots date to 1981 with undergraduate students John Coulter, BS ’83, and Mark Miller, BS ’82. The two would visit the weather observations platform atop Porter Hall and tune into the NWS forecast from Pittsburgh. Using this and local weather coverage and observations, they would prepare a forecast and record it on an answering machine. The project quickly expanded in response to demand, logging over 100,000 calls in its first year of operation. The lab’s namesake, Tim Scalia, was a pre-meteorology freshman who died in a car accident in April 1980.

“The lab has a really impressive history of students getting this passion, talking to a faculty member who provided a little bit of funding, and then taking it and running,” says lab director Ryan Fogt, also a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Geography Department. “It has always been, and is today, a student-centered lab.”

Today, Scalia Lab still provides forecasts by phone (740-593-1717), as well as on its website and social media platforms (Facebook and X). Meteorology student staffers fall under two disciplines: geography and broadcasting, the latter a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences and E.W. Scripps School of Journalism that began in 2020 and is one of eight undergraduate programs for broadcast meteorology in the country.

“It is a challenge to blend in science and journalism,” Fogt says. “We’re providing students with both of those experiences as an undergraduate, and they’re landing jobs right away in the field because there’s so much demand.”

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Feature image: (Left) Weather observation equipment atop Porter Hall, seen here in this photo circa 1966, was the starting point for Scalia Lab. Photo courtesy the Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections. (Right) Scalia Lab Director Ryan Fogt explains the West State Street Weather Station’s meteorological instruments to local elementary school students in 2013. Photo by Ben Wirtz Siegel, BSVC ’02