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McHenry County’s ‘weather guru’ weighs in on winter, weather

CRYSTAL LAKE, ILL. — It’s been a mild-mannered winter for the Midwest: higher-than-normal temperatures, lower-than-normal snowfalls, and a January that sent golfers out to the greens and left skiers pining for a blizzard. But that unpredictability is what makes meteorology so enticing to Paul Hamill, a meteorologist and instructor at McHenry County College.

Known as the “weather guru” for his elaborate weather station — with more than a dozen monitors — at the community college’s Crystal Lake campus, Hamill was interviewed in a recent TribLocal story by reporter Lawerence Synett about this winter’s weather and how it will pan out.

In the story, Hamill noted that the early predictions of a very cold winter fell short because of an unforeseen weather movement.

“We never could have predicted the way this winter started,” Hamill is quoted in the story. “We definitely though it was going to start getting colder sooner. La Nina should have given us a colder winter but it didn’t because arctic isolation was stopping it.”

And though temps have normalized somewhat, Hamill says predicting how the rest of the winter will shape up isn’t easy.

It was an unpredictable tornado that got a 5-year-old Hamill interested in the weather. The twister hit when Hamill was visiting his aunt’s Illinois farm, and although he was hustled into a basement—much to his frustration—he got to go outside afterwards and was amazed at the destruction he saw.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I always knew I wanted to be a meteorologist from that point on. I think my dad wanted me to be an accountant. That just didn’t seem as much fun.”

Read the full interview HERE.