Cantore knows the odds are he will witness another Katrina. Possibly worse. He recites the facts: escalating temperatures, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration clocking in at over 400 parts per million, rising sea levels. "Storm surge starts there," he says. "That's where the game gets played. We've built onto the coasts everywhere. And now that we're seeing more and more hurricanes, we realize, oh shit. A Sandy in Miami?" He shakes his head, eyes wide as poker chips.
In some ways The Weather Channel is the only true reality television left, the one remaining chunk of programming that cannot be modified to suit a desired narrative. And what makes Cantore so watchable is not so much that he can digest and report a forecast but that he inhabits the same space we all do: the discombobulating territory between shock and awe. Watch his past appearances on Storm Chasers and you can see it in his face as he watches twisters tearing up the landscape—that blend of thrill and dread. Cantore understands our innate desire to court fear, to watch the storm roll in even as we know what it might cost us, to categorize and measure the forces that dwarf us. He knows, too, that the only course of action that remains for viewers—and the rest of us—is to adapt, to do what we can for one another.
Before he covered his first storm, in 1992, he extended a three-day forecast to five days, Cantore says. No one had done that before with a hurricane. Seconds after Cantore got off the air, a producer handed him a phone, saying Bob Sheets, then director of the National Hurricane Center, was calling. "I thought they were joking with me," Cantore says. "Then I heard his voice, and I thought, oh shit." Sheets asked Cantore if he'd lengthened the Hurricane Andrew forecast. "I told him, 'All I said was, if it keeps going in this direction, everybody from the Outer Banks to Florida needs to pay attention.' And he yelled, 'Don't do that again! I've had every emergency manager up the entire East Coast calling me!'"
Cantore apologized, but he realized something for the first time: People were watching.
He likens his job to being a fireman. There when you need him. Ready with a plan or escape route
On the morning of his AMHQ premiere, ensconced in Boston, Cantore provides updates on what will become several weeks of record snowfall. Liberated from the set, his joy is palpable. Between takes he goofs around on snowshoes, tweets photos of himself eating a hunk of compacted snow like it was a foot-long sub. On air he is both energized and stern in his admonitions to stay off the roads. He litters his reports with bro-speak: jacked, crushed, pumped, amped. The sky doesn't flurry, it "pukes snow." But between takes, he retreats to the van to study what is coming next, to focus on how he can help people plan, what he can tell them that might provide some relief.
Cantore calls me on his way to fly to Virginia Tech after his brief stop at home. He sounds a bit subdued. "Quite frankly, these last three weeks are killing me," he says. "I'm crying uncle. Actually, I'm on my fifth uncle."
The weather will eventually settle for a spell, and during these types of interludes Cantore tries to escape to his cabin in the mountains of northern Georgia. He chops wood. He builds fires. He plants Japanese maples. Divorced since 2006, Cantore often takes his kids, Christina, 21, and Ben, 19. Both were born with Fragile X syndrome, a neurological disability akin to and often overlapping with autism. "At first I was pissed," Cantore says of the diagnoses. "Once I accepted that some things are going to be easy and some aren't, it got better."
Cantore takes fatherhood as seriously as he does his forecasting. When ex-wife Tamra was pregnant with their first child, Cantore reached out to his own birth mother via the adoption agency. But when they located her, she chose not to reconnect. "The agency said, 'Well, Jim, unfortunately about 15 percent of the time, parents don't really want to acknowledge the situation, and you are one of those 15 percent.'" He shrugs. "It hurt then. Not anymore."
Cantore is used to swallowing his feelings. It comes with the job. He tries to fully reckon with one storm before moving to the next. People count on him. The sun is setting as he pulls his truck into the airport lot, gathers his bags. Strangers ask where he's headed. He answers patiently, then turns his attention back to our conversation. Why does he love the weather so much? "Simple," he says. "It's the one thing I can't control."
Cantore tells me that the way he sees it, "There is no tomorrow." There is only now. This day. This moment. And in this moment, there is a giant storm brewing up north, and he intends to fly headlong into it.
from ffffff http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a15109/jim-cantore-the-weather-channel/
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