University of Delaware Office of Public Relations The Messenger Vol. 6, No. 1/1996 Forecaster prefers his weather fickle Rob Guariano's job depends on the weather-the worse the better. For the weekend weather forecaster at Fox Television- Channel 29 in Philadelphia, there's nothing more tedious than a string of sunny days. "Lots of sunny days in a row are a real challenge. How are you going to present that as news to viewers every night?," he asks. On this particular sunny October day (the fourth in a row), Guariano, Delaware '87, is contemplating a computer image of a deck of cards with suns on them. "I think I'll use that tonight and say something about the great hand Mother Nature has dealt us," he says. Guariano is a self-described weather nut. He was the kid who hung out for fun at the weather center at the New Castle County (Del.) Airport. "The night before a big snowstorm, I'd be so wound up, I'd race through the house, first looking out the front windows to see the street conditions and then running to the back windows to check out the backyard. My mom would always tell me to slow down. 'Nothing's changed in the last two minutes,' she would say." Guariano's weather addiction followed him to the University, where he majored in geography. President of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity and the Interfraternity Council, he gave daily weather postings to his fraternity brothers and took a lot of heat when he got one wrong. One night in 1983, when a big snowstorm was forecast, he recalls, "Everyone wanted to know if I thought they would have class the next day." After a stint in sales, Guariano took his first weather- related job with Metro Weather, a forecasting service on Long Island, N.Y. From there, he went to work at WCBS in New York City as a behind-the-scenes forecaster, preparing maps and graphics. During Operation Desert Storm, he was pulled over to CBS' news side, working behind the scenes with Dan Rather, forecasting winds in the Middle East and their possible impact on chemical warfare. Guariano's kept a weather journal since he was l0 years old, so it's not surprising that he remembers the inches of snow that fell during his next job as a weatherperson for WSTM/NBC-TV in Syracuse. "We had one storm in 1993 that dumped 43 inches of snow in the area. In the four years I was there, we had 604 inches of snow." But, nothing quite prepared him for the first evening on his next job, at a larger NBC affiliate in Indianapolis. "We had a tornado the first night I was on the job. The weather was so bad we lost our feed to Saturday Night Live and I had to ad lib for 20 minutes. I ended up being on the air until 4 a.m. I wasn't all that familiar with the area yet, and I didn't know all of the names of the cities and towns. The next day, the local newspaper ran a short article about my ordeal that 'welcomed' me to the city." Forecasting on location is one of the things Guariano likes most about his work. Being out in the middle of Hurricane Opal wasn't as dangerous as it looked, he says, even if the roof was nearly ripped off the motel where they were staying. Over the years, Guariano also has forecast local weather from Disney World (10 times) to help promote new attractions-speaking from different countries at Epcot Center and from the Tower of Terror and a Flintstones' car. He once forecast live from a state fair where a llama started to nibble at his script, and legend has it that he's given weather reports while zooming down a waterslide and sledding down a snow-packed hill. At Fox, Guariano is on the air Fridays and Saturdays, fills in 13 weeks a year for other meteorologists at the station and works as a roving reporter in bad weather. In his spare time, he has authored Forecasting for the '90s-a 200-page correspondence course; has invented a children's weather game, which he hopes will be out next year; and works for Precision Weather Forecasting, a service for those interested in skiing in the Poconos. Being a weather forecaster can be tough, Guariano says, though he never loses heart. "You meet people who open a conversation with, 'Oh, you guys are never right, anyway' and you're defending yourself, right off the bat," he says. "But, we're much better than we were l0 years ago, and the beauty of the job is that every day, every storm is different. You always get another chance." -Beth Thomas