Who am I?
I have always been fascinated by the weather, especially severe weather. I graduated from Bridgewater College in Virginia with a double major in Physics and Mathematics. In 1992 I got my amateur radio license and became involved with SKYWARN (trained by the Sterling, VA NWS office) and ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service). I was then accepted to Virginia Tech for graduate work in technology education and graphic communication. After this I moved to Morehead City, North Carolina where I took the basic and advanced SKYWARN courses from the Morehead City NWS office. After teaching high school math and science for 11 years at East Carteret High School in Beaufort, NC, I decided it was time to take my love of the weather to the next level.
In 2012 I entered the Masters program in Meteorology at Florida Institute of Technology. I became a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and stayed active in SKYWARN, taking the basic and advanced courses from the Melbourne, FL NWS office. In August of 2014, I was accepted into the PhD program in Environmental Science/Meteorology. I worked under a NOAA/CSTAR grant - "An Ensemble-based Approach to Forecasting Surf, Set-up, and Surge in the Coastal Zone" - and was the 2016 Link Fellow in Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation. I earned my PhD in meteorology in December 2018 and and am currently the Sr Tech Advisor for the Environmental Modeling and Simulation flight of the 24th Analysis Squadron with the US Air Force.
The History of Orion Weather
I first started thinking about creating a weather site in 2000, after many of my friends in Beaufort, NC had significant damage from Hurricane Floyd in 1999. Orion Weather officially went online in 2001 and was intended as a place for me to coordinate the various weather maps, satellite images, and other internet sites that I used - I never expected anyone else to actually find it useful. However, after I added real-time radar loops superimposed on VIS/IR satellite imagery, a large number of local boaters, charter fisherman, the Carolina Kite Club, and others started using Orion Weather for their weather needs, and I had to update the bandwidth of the site.
As of January 2024, after 23 years of being relatively unchanged, the entire site has a new look, new servers, and some new features such as fire weather and surf forecasts.