On today's show : Hutch Johnson, ex-TV meteorologist, launches digital venture. Dave Thompson gives weekly news update. Matt Olien reviews "May December."
Estimated reading time: 23 minutes.
Highlights of the Interview with Hutch Johnson, Chief Meteorologist
- Career Transition: Hutch Johnson discusses his shift from commercial meteorology to creating his own weather-focused social media platform. He highlights the desire for stability and continuity in his family life as a key motivator for this change.
- On-Air Blunders and Recovery: Johnson reflects on memorable on-air blunders during his early career, emphasizing the importance of adapting and having fun in live broadcasting, even when mistakes happen.
- Accuracy in Weather Forecasting: Hutch addresses the inherent challenges in weather forecasting, explaining how meteorologists grade themselves and deal with inaccuracies, especially regarding temperature predictions.
- Technological Evolution in Meteorology: He describes the significant advancements in weather forecasting technology from the 1990s to present, such as the shift from outdated computers to real-time data delivery, which has transformed the way meteorologists work.
- Social Media vs. Traditional Broadcasting: Johnson compares producing weather content for social media channels to traditional over-the-air channels, highlighting the flexibility and interactivity offered by social media platforms.
- Autonomy and Personality in Broadcasting: Discussing the autonomy and personal touch he brings to his current role, Hutch emphasizes the importance of interactivity and engaging with the audience in a two-way communication model.
- Evolution and Future Plans: Hutch outlines his future plans, including embracing viewer ideas, expanding his platforms, and possibly developing a dedicated weather app. He stresses the importance of evolving and adapting to meet audience needs.
- Collaboration with National Weather Service: Johnson talks about his relationship with the National Weather Service, noting the importance of collaboration and acknowledging differences in meteorological opinions.
- Climate Change Observations: He shares his observations on the changing weather patterns over the years, discussing increased tornado reports and the impact of technology on weather awareness.
- Role of AI in Meteorology: Hutch considers the role of artificial intelligence in weather forecasting, emphasizing the continued relevance of human judgment in interpreting and selecting the best models for accurate predictions.
- Community Support and Influence: Johnson expresses gratitude for the strong community support he's received, highlighting how community feedback has shaped his approach to delivering weather content.
The interview provides a comprehensive look into Hutch Johnson's career, his approach to modern meteorology, and his plans for leveraging social media to enhance weather broadcasting.
Hutch Johnson Chief Meteorologist Transcript
Main Street
Hutch, welcome to Main Street.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Oh, thank you so much for the invitation. It's wonderful to be here. I'm wonderful to get a chance to chat about, well, what's coming ahead.
Main Street
And it's exciting for me to watch what you're doing, Hutch, and we're really going to get into it. But tell me what inspired this transition from you being a commercial meteorologist to creating your own weather-focused social media platform.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Well, the number one thing came in the fact that in television, there's television stations and many times they're hundreds of miles apart, right? So if you make a transition in your career, it oftentimes means you're moving somewhere. And I didn't want to move.
I've raised four kids here. I have one in high school. I wanted to stay here.
And after really thinking about it, I really focused on options that were local options for me. And I still wanted to do, Craig, what I enjoy doing, and that's forecasting our weather, getting the information, and kind of picking out the pieces that I think are important to people, but in a new way. And I started thinking about it a little bit and was really excited to come up with this concept of how about a two-way type of a weather street, if you will, where you could maybe even ask questions while I'm doing the broadcast or the communication, and we can get those answers that folks are looking for right on these social platforms.
Main Street
So Hutch, tell me, before we move forward, the biggest blunder you've made as a weather forecaster, what you really got wrong, and then how did you recover?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Well, I got to tell you, there's never been a perfect show. I'd oftentimes tell people I've worked with or weather kids, you know, I've never had a perfect show. So there's always some blunders out there, but some of the most memorable would be one time early in my career, we have these clickers that advance our graphics, and they're basically garage store openers.
I dropped it, and my camera person in the studio back when we used to have camera people did the stop, drop, and roll, rolled underneath the camera shot and handed me, you saw this little hand come up and hand me the clicker. That was a classic. And then it's how you deal with these punches and roll with them in live broadcasting.
So one time early in my career, the control room who tries real hard was getting ready to prep the Mr. Food segment, which was of turkey. It was this time of the year, you know, cooking a turkey. And behind me, instead of my weather map, when I went to point to it, I looked down, there's big turkey in a roasting pan sitting there.
So you just roll with the punches and have a little fun.
Main Street
All right. We all know Hutch, that weather forecasters are never 100% accurate. Wait, what?
Yeah. Have you ever really bombed a forecast and had to recover from that?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Yes. And it happens more often than you'd think, but it's not every day. We like to think that we're getting better, but there are still those times when we miss it.
But I think the first thing to clear up with everybody is how do we grade ourselves, right? I could say a 30% chance of rain, and then it rains. And then somebody will come up to me the next day and says, well, you were 70% wrong.
I'm like, well, what do you mean? So realistically, in meteorology, when we're looking at temperatures, if it's within a degree or two, that's awesome. So I give myself an A and a good pat on the back if we're within about three degrees of the temperatures that we're saying at different times during the day.
And the worst temperature blow that I ever had, I was working in Bismarck, and we had a cold front coming up from the north, but it was slow and it was pokey. And we expected it to be moving through about peak heating time of the day. And it's this time of the year where we could have temperatures ranging from, say, about 70 to 40, so like late fall.
And well, I thought the cold front wasn't going to quite make it to Bismarck. So I was going on the high side, and we're going to be 65 degrees. And I think we were like 45 degrees, like a 20 degree.
So how did I handle that? The next day, I don't condone this, you young broadcasters, but I did put a paper bag on my head in the weather center and said, you know, I feel a little bit. But I showed them that literally just a couple of miles south of Bismarck, in like the Moe Bridge area, that they did hit the 70s.
And it's like, that's what makes a job fun. But it's OK to look back and say what went wrong too.
Main Street
Hutch, I've got to believe that in your experience as a weather forecaster, meteorologist, that the way you get information has changed a ton. Tell us how it used to be and how it is today.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
My first on-air job was in Cheyenne, Wyoming. And we had a computer system that was like a clunker that nobody even uses today. And we had these modems that you would dial up, and you'd hear the sounds that modems made in the past to let you know they were working.
And we would, an hour before the show, download the graphics that we used. So that meant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, back in the 90s, 1990s, we would go to air at 10 o'clock with graphics that were made from the previous hour with satellite loops that were an hour old. And you could not cover severe weather because of that.
If there were thunderstorms moving, there was no way to get a right now radar scan. So you would just let the crawl computers do it. Now we have instant data delivery.
And that means that I can go on the air and have a radar image that's seconds old, no more than six minutes old, and show where the hotspot is, what direction it's moving, when it might get to your town. So that's been the biggest thing for my professional career is just the speed of the data transfer. Because weather is just tons and tons of data.
And we've got to move that somewhere. So that's the big thing. And the computers help to automate things just like they do for your daily job.
So in the days past, I would have to type in all the cities I forecast for and type in the forecast individually. Now I can open it up and a computer model can handle most of it. And I can pick which one matches the forecast I think is going to be accurate.
And it does help streamline some of that content as well.
Main Street
How different is it producing for now a social media channel relative to an over the air channel?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
It's I think easier. And one of the things that I can do is I can look at the day and on a broadcast that you might see on television, or maybe even what you hear on the radio, it's really been kind of molded into this piece that says we got to start here, you got to have this graphic, that graphic, the radar, the satellite, then you have this forecast, and the seven day at the end or 10 day, or whatever it's become. I get to sit here and look at the window and say, you know what, the only thing we have to worry about today is how much sun we're going to get and how warm it's going to be.
I'm going to get breeze through that. And we're going to focus on what we really need to pay attention to in the upcoming days. So I think I don't need to worry about producing 55 different graphics, I need to pick the ones that are important, and then communicate to the people and they can communicate back.
So it's been a, you know, I don't have to spend as much time producing as many pieces of content. But that's something that's coming and that's going to change for me as well. I am learning how to do these graphics kind of like I did back in Cheyenne.
I'm typing in the numbers, I'm typing in everything. It's not all automated yet, but it's getting there. I'm learning how to do this walking.
And I'm really glad I had the experience I did back in Cheyenne, back in Bismarck, and in my early days here in Fargo, because without it and without the automation, I think I might be at a loss as to how to produce a professional looking graphic for folks to look at on social.
Main Street
Do you have more autonomy going in on your own than you did when you were in television?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Somewhat. There are some things that I have the ability to do. And I don't know if I would highlight the autonomy of it.
I enjoy, and even did on the air, having my personality there. If you meet me in person, what you saw on TV, it was me. I can be goofy sometimes.
I was the class clown in fourth grade. I like to have a lot of fun. But when the weather gets serious, I also, because of my enjoyment of understanding how weather works and trying to figure out where a storm's going, I'm very serious about making sure that information gets to the right people.
So not so much the autonomy of doing it, but I really enjoy the aspect of the interactivity. It's kind of like the missing days of yore when people would call in with reports or different things like that. And I also enjoy the freedom of being able to do the weather when I need to, to get the information out.
In TV, we have to wait for the four, the five, or the six, or the 10 to start. And sometimes weather happens in between those events. And guess what Hutch can do?
I'll be there. It doesn't matter what program's on because I don't have to interrupt something else. I can put it on social.
And while you're watching your something else, enjoy your football game. Hutch can have that content on your cellular device, on mobile, and you can just look at it. Where do people find you then, Hutch?
Well, right now things are still getting developed, but my Facebook following has grown, as you've mentioned, to 45,000 now, and it continues to grow. And I'm starting a YouTube channel that's grown, jeez, from zero to 4,000 in a month. So things are going real good as far as people finding out.
I appreciate being here to let more people know because there's a lot of people that see me in the street and are asking how I'm enjoying retirement. I am not retired, and they're surprised to hear it. So getting the word out, and if you hear this, hey, let people know, Hutch is still out there.
You'll look up Hutch's weather on YouTube and subscribe there. Or look for my Facebook page, and that is Hutch Johnson, Chief Meteorologist. Do a search for Hutch Johnson Meteorologist.
You'll find me, and then follow me there. And social media is different. You can sit on the Davenport at four and know there's going to be a news broadcast.
For my content, you go to that page and you look at it, you're going to see the latest thing that's out there, the most up-to-date information that you can get as far as what's important here, and then some bonus content to boot.
Main Street
The bonus stuff, that's what we'll look forward to, Hutch. So what you're telling me then is that if inclement or bad weather happens at 10 a.m., we're going to be able to hear from you. If it happens at midnight, we're going to be able to hear from you.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
You can. How can one person do all of this, Hutch? It's a learning process.
But you know what? I realized after early time in my venture here that I did it anyways. For the last 26 years I've done it.
As a chief meteorologist, you're up watching stuff overnight. When you have a team, you can cover everything morning, noon, and night. And I have to really police my own self so that I don't overdo it.
I can't watch every cloud that moves overhead. But by really focusing on what the days that I'm going to need to be there for 20 hours if need be, or 28 hours if need be, or whatever it is, then I will be there. So that's kind of the thing.
I need to know when to let off the gas pedal, and I'm learning all of that as I go.
Main Street
We're really enjoying our conversation with Hutch Johnson, a very familiar weather personality here in North Dakota. He was a chief meteorologist at Valley News Live here in Fargo for 16 remarkable years. Now he's ventured out on his own, but still has a fantastic weather presence.
Hutch, the dumbest weatherman joke you've ever heard.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
I have the dumbest weatherman joke inherent, and I share it with all the weather kids that I've had over the years, or many of them. So let's go right here and say knock, knock. Who's there?
Hutch! Hutch who? Gesundheit, you must have a cold.
Let me get you some Kleenex.
Main Street
I don't get to ask you if your crystal ball is now a newer version now that you have went out on your own versus the older version you may have had when you were on TV.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
I'll tell you what, the content that we use for making a forecast is available to me at my fingertips in my basement, just like it was at the television station, because it's all online, right? We can go on and look at all these different models and such. And you know what?
My colleagues at the National Weather Service in Grand Forks, North Dakota do an incredible job for our region, as do the meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in Chanhassen in the Twin Cities, and out in Duluth, and out in Bismarck. And you know what? They do work 24-7 and do a great job of putting some content together for our entire area.
So building off of those things, using the tools available to me, it's not any more difficult than it was at the television station with a good computer with good access.
Main Street
So if I were to ask you what your market is right now, Hutch, would you say it's just eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota? Or would you say, no, it's the whole state and the whole region?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
I want it to be a little bit more, but I don't know what I can handle, so it's a learning curve for me. Let's use an example of a winter storm that's impacting the whole region. I know that's coming for days, that's easy.
But if it's a line of thunderstorms that's starting at 7 p.m. in Billings, Montana, and it moves into Bismarck at 7 a.m. the next day, that's 12 straight hours of covering. And then it gets to Fargo at midnight the next day. So I can't do that.
But what I can do is put together the puzzle pieces that lead us up to it. This is coming. This is where it's going to be.
It's a learning curve for me, checking in with people and making sure that they have the information they need, and knowing that they can check in there and get the details they need. I can't work 48 hours straight. I've tried before, but I'm getting a little older now.
That's hard. I need to police myself, as we said before, a little bit.
Main Street
How do you plan to evolve from where we are today? You've told me now that you've even evolved since you've started using social media to do your weather broadcast. What's in your future?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
I'll tell you, it's becoming more clear to me every day how I can make this work and how excited that I am about doing it. And it's all because of viewers and listeners over the years contacting me with their ideas. So what we're doing, or what I'm doing, is I'm taking their ideas of when they want the weather, how they get the weather, what time they want the weather, what do they want in the weather, what towns are you in.
And if you have a question, interact with me. So all this is being built, and I'm realizing and learning that it's not always about having a live broadcast at four o'clock. I'm going to do lives.
Those are always important, and particularly in critical weather situations, you can count on Hutch. I got to tell you, I've always said we're at our best when the weather's at its worst. But making sure that they can get the content that they need on just an ordinary day, too, is a critical piece of the factor.
So how I see it growing is the fact that more and more people hear Hutch is doing it, and I'm rolling out different platforms. So right now I'm on social media, but that's not always going to be the case. And I'll have more announcements on that in the near future.
But I can give you a couple of winks and hints that, you know, a website is a great place to have content, and it's a great place for people to go to get connected with you. And I can use that as a place to do interactive things with the people. The viewers have shared ideas of what they want.
I had a lot of fun sharing weather photos that you take in your hometown. So whether you live, you know, in Bemidji or whether you live in Alexandria and you have some fantastic thing you've seen, even if it's like, Hutch, how'd this happen? I love that.
And then I can share your picture on my broadcasts and different things like that. So that two-way street will continue on the website. And I'm also looking at other options.
Many have said, Hutch, you should have your own weather app. So that is something that I'm looking at very, very seriously. And I'm also working on partnerships with local businesses to make it all possible because without that support, I really can't continue to do this at the level I am.
The last four months, I have spent 100 percent of my professional time developing my studio, learning how to make my graphics, getting the look together, talking to the viewers about what works for them. And then now I'm trying to crawl before I run.
Main Street
Does it surprise you? And what does it mean to you that you have 45,000 people out of the gate, Hutch, who are now following you?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Well, not only do they just follow, Craig, they are so supportive. They're like, they're the ones giving me ideas. Hutch, you should do this because we would use it.
Hutch, you should do this. We would support you. And that's the kind of real encouragement and building up that this community does.
And that's why I love staying here, Craig. It's like we are a community that helps each other out. And there's a lot of people that that have just flat out expressed they want to see this succeed and that they would want to get their weather when they want it as opposed to, you know, maybe how it was done in the past.
So I see it as being the future that, you know, I'm holding a cell phone here, but it's like almost everybody is using that device to get information. But they can still get that information from a trained, seasoned professional who's been forecasting in this region for 26 years, Bismarck, before I was here for almost a decade there as well, and have that expertise and guidance on, you know what, these are the huge impacts, but you tell me what you're seeing.
Main Street
So Hutch, in severe weather, have you ever disagreed with the National Weather Service in what your perception of the forecast was going to be and what they were saying it was going to be? And do you ever collaborate?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
We do collaborate. There's some platforms that we use to kind of communicate our thoughts. Having one message for everybody is desirable, but it's not always possible.
What you'll notice too is sometimes, sometimes, even from National Weather Service office to Weather Service office, there might be some changes and stuff. So you'll see a winter storm warning abruptly cut off in the central North Dakota, but not be extended out here. Well, they're still deciding on what counties need to be included or excluded.
And sometimes in broadcasting, we always had our own schedule that we had to have our forecast ready to go at a certain time. So we do our best to do that. So yes, if you fill a room full of meteorologists, five of us, you're going to get five different opinions.
And so literally that's okay. It really is okay. Oftentimes our opinions are very, very close.
Main Street
You noticed a change in area weather, Hutch, in the last 16 years that is discernible. We came to North Dakota last year and everyone said, oh, it's like the worst winter we've ever had. And now we're out in our t-shirts almost in December.
Right. What's changing about our weather?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Well, we have a lot to change about, but I always keep in mind that my little piece of experience on this beautiful planet of ours is very short, climatologically speaking, you know, I've lived 50 plus years on this planet and I really only paid attention from age 10, right? So that's 40 years of experience I have. Who am I to speak on that?
But we can look at past records and we can look at some things. And it is interesting to note, here's some things to keep in mind. One, we all have a cell phone with a camera.
We have increased tornadoes, but we have more people with cameras and we report more tornadoes than we ever did. Back in the day, if you were on your tractor plowing your field or planting your seed and you saw a tornado in the field next to you and it did no harm, you didn't even call anybody about it. Have we seen an increase in tornadoes?
Maybe, maybe not. So that's the kind of stuff where our technology is leading us to this awareness of things that are going on, on a smaller scale, in smaller locations, in places we never heard about before. And our radars see the weather happening.
Hey, maybe there was a tornado there. Yep. There was, we got a picture from you.
So, you know, take some of this stuff with a grain of salt and realize our image of our weather here when I grew up in the seventies and eighties in a drought. Yeah, I know what a drought can be. Now I know what it can be like to be in a wet cycle here and seeing Devil's Lake swallow up all this land and having Fargo, Moorhead, Grand Forks, and the Red River Valley seeing floods almost every couple, two to four years.
That's not normal for my timeframe, nor yours who are living here with me. But yeah, back in the day, folks, it was, it was.
Main Street
You have a mentor that has really influenced you? I like his Al Roker, your hero.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
That's a great question. When I was a young person going to high school and college, I used to love watching weather, living in the Denver area in my later high school years. When I really said, this is what I want to do.
There are a few people there. The late great Stormy Rotman. He was a meteorologist out there and at Channel Nine in Denver.
Main Street
Yes, he was. I used to watch Stormy.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Absolutely. Yeah. And Mike Nelson, who works there today, interning with some folks out that way was just an incredible learning experience.
So yes. But the other thing is, is as a meteorological community, we can look at how we're all handling weather. I do watch the weather in the cities, you know, in past years, Paul Douglas and being live on the air with a tornado in the Midwest with storm chasers.
You know, all of that kind of stuff evolves because we see each other handling situations that are new, unique in unique ways. And then you're like, that is a good idea. Let's do that here.
Main Street
I've always thought that wind seemed to be the most difficult thing for you folks to forecast. Is that true?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
If you're coming from Wyoming or Colorado or parts of Western Montana, yes. The Rocky mountains have their own wind machine there that can change a forecast. But when you live in the Midwest, wind is a lot more predictable than some of the other places in the mountainous regions.
And that's because, you know, because of the sun coming up and heating up the side of the mountain, you're going to get what's called a valley breeze up the mountain and at night it cools off and it shoots right back down. Those are the main impacts in the mountains. So if you grow up in Denver, it was very hard to forecast winds in Denver based on those kinds of things, because there's all these little areas that get the mountain and valley breezes here.
It's more related to the pressure patterns and we can more aptly predict the wind direction and even the wind speed here. I think it's a lot easier here than it is in the Rocky mountains.
Main Street
We've been approached here at Prairie Public for folks that were touting AI products to us. Hutch, and I know you don't have a lot of experience with AI, but have you thought about it in context of what it may mean in weather forecasting in the future?
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
I think in some way we've seen artificial intelligence in the form of computer generated models that predict how the weather is going to do their simulations of our atmosphere. And so, yes, they're helpful. And we've been using AI in that sense, computer generated forecast simulations of the atmosphere that go out one day, two days and 10 days.
Also, there's some AI using history and saying, this is what's happened before. Well, meteorologists have been doing this with our little brains for a long time. AI can help us do thousands of comparisons and come up with something.
But because weather is weather, I'm not confident that it's going to do any better than some of the things that we've done, so I'm going to continue to stand tall on my soapbox and say, you know what, if you have an app on your phone and it's, I'm just going to throw a name out there, it's AccuWeather, it's the weather bug, it's the weather channel. Those are all national weather, computer generated simulated models, not very much human input into it, and by golly, it's going to give you the numbers it thinks from one model, whereas when you have that local source, Hutch's Weather, for instance, wink, wink, you know, I'm going over five, 10, 15 different models locally in the short range and picking the one that's handling it the best now, the one that's handled it best in the last couple of weeks, you know, I'm going through my checklist and I'm saying, this is the best one, and it's not always what our models will put out on an app.
So I still think there's a place for us human meteorologists who make human errors to really help guide the process, just like we do sometimes with parking our car. I can't imagine getting in a car and letting it drive and park and all that stuff yet, but in time, it's going to happen.
Main Street
Have just a few more seconds, Hutch. Are we going to have a white Christmas? You're on the spot.
You got to tell us.
Hutch Johnson, hutchsweather.com
Right now through the middle of December, I'm not seeing any significant, significant events, but having a white Christmas here is not a guarantee, but it's very, very common, you know, greater than 70%. So let's go with a yes, we're going to have that one inch of snow on the ground for Christmas, but it's not really likely to happen until we get into mid December and those last couple of weeks. [NOTE: This interview was conducted in early December] And if you ask me what and when the models are too far out to be specific about that, it just looks like a little bit more active pattern beginning the middle of the month, like late eighth, ninth and beyond.
Main Street
Hutch Johnson. We miss seeing you on the television, but we are happy. We can still see you on the computer.
Hutch's weather. You should take a look. Thanks for joining us on Main Street.
NOTE: AI generated this transcript, and there may be errors. The audio broadcast is the official show record.