Even as a child, Dennis Cavanaugh has always had his eyes on the skies.
Growing up in northern Ohio, Cavanaugh had an interest in weather because of the lake effect snow storms that often dropped a foot of snow overnight around Lake Eerie.
“It always fascinated me to be in these heavy snowfall areas. It helped that school was generally canceled the next day, too,” Cavanaugh said. “But that led me to start keeping track of the weather. And when we were going to get these crazy snowstorms, I started watching the evening news. Lake effect snow in the 1980s wasn’t very well forecasted, so you accepted growing up that totals could be off by a foot or so. It drove a lot of interest in me. Now that I know a lot more, I know why it’s such a difficult thing to forecast, and modern technology does a much better job than models before supercomputers, but it’s still challenging. It led me to start keeping track of the weather even when it wasn’t winter, partially because I was bored in school. Every hour, I’d write down sky conditions and what direction the wind was blowing and cloud textures, and started noticing patterns.”
As a teen, Cavanaugh was often too preoccupied with sports to keep up with his weather-tracking habits. When he started to look at potential programs and majors for colleges, his outcome of getting to do much in a very competitive meteorology field seemed bleak.
“I knew I wanted to go to college, though. My mom was a teacher, and I felt that I could make a living doing that. I wanted to teach high school, and I double majored in mathematics and secondary school education. I did that for a year and found out it wasn’t very fun, but it was super easy to get a job doing it. I felt that if I went back to school and did something I really liked, I would still have those degrees as a safety net in my background,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh decided to take the risk and go back to school for meteorology.
“I figured that I might as well do something I like. It wasn’t the teaching aspect I didn’t enjoy; it was student issues that made it hard. You didn’t just get to teach; you had to do way more. I went back and got my Master’s in meteorology. I volunteered at the National Weather Services (NWS) Center in Wilmington, Ohio. I also interned at a TV station, but realized I liked doing the work of getting the forecast instead of the work of presenting the forecast as TV meteorologists did,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh spent nearly a year diligently applying for jobs with the National Weather Service Center. Finally, he got the break he’d been waiting for.
“It took me nine months of applying to get into the NWS at the Topeka, Kansas office as a basic forecaster in January of 2005. From there, with a little over four years of experience, I was hired as a lead forecaster at the Dallas-Fort Worth NWS, then as the warning coordination meteorologist here in Little Rock. I still end up doing a lot of teaching, but it’s with a voluntary audience. I also like teaching in college, and that was always great, but by having a role in creating the forecaster while teaching classes of public interest, I’ve really found my niche.”
Cavanaugh shared some of the challenges that he has faced in his meteorology career.
“Getting into the NWS was far from a sure thing, so applying for 25-plus jobs before someone makes you an offer is tough and humbling. You learn that it’s not all about your grades; it’s about your experiences and relationships that play a much larger role in actually getting a job. The schooling is important, but the life lessons of 24 failures before you get something that works can be hard to sustain over nine months. Many times you didn’t hear back. It was a struggle to get in,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh explained that another challenge lies in the fact that weather never stops, whether you’re on the clock or not.
“Once I got in, at least in the NWS, the weather is an ongoing thing. It doesn’t have any abrupt stops or starts. The weather may not occur within the window of time you’re available — it’s going to do what it’s going to do whether you’re there or not. There are no days off, and we’re working 24/7, 365. Our team has rotating shifts: day shifts, evening shifts and then midnight shifts. Throughout my career, we’ve created a whole forecast package. At midnight, you can get more stuff done because fewer people are awake. It messes with your body and sleep schedule, and family time. I have two kids, and a kid’s schedule is like any other school schedule — they’re at home in the late afternoon and evening. I would work the entire time they were at home and awake, and while I was home, they were at school, and that gets old after a while. It will be different for every person’s life schedule. It is a major life adjustment,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh said that another challenge is helping people understand just how weather works.
“Then there’s just the nature of a forecast. If you listen to common weather jokes, you’ll hear people talk about how it must be nice to get paid to be wrong, but you can’t really respond to that in any way. There’s really no winning in that scenario. If we were only right half the time, we wouldn’t be in agency. Our forecasts are accurate most of the time. Predicting the future has many, many variables. If you think you can check the weather forecast three days before and that’s what it’s going to be, then of course, you’re going to be furious when it’s not. The forecast is updated twice a day, every day, based on new information. The fact that you have to keep paying attention to the forecast is a difficult concept for people to grasp.
“I try to relate it to the NCAA basketball tournaments. How was your bracket after the first two rounds? There are only 64 elements, and you know all of the teams; that’s a tiny data set. How can you get it wrong? But if you were able to update your bracket after each round of games, your forecast would improve. Brackets are fun, but meteorology is real life, with hundreds, if not thousands, of variables at play. We update the forecast every 12 hours. We try to eliminate the uncertainty. The atmosphere behaves in a way that we can understand. The more instrumentation that we have available, the better we can predict and improve the forecast. Everything we don’t account for becomes a bigger error. It’s not magic; we’re not rolling the dice; it’s just science. We’re measuring it and predicting how we think it will behave in the future,” Cavanaugh said.
Fortunately, Cavanaugh has had many successes over the course of his meteorology career.
“Some of the successes have included predicting high-risk storms and communicating warnings from our office in a multifaceted way and working with partners in media and emergency management to make sure those warnings are being communicated in various ways to various audiences. We talk to people who were in harm’s way, and they say after the fact that they heard your warning and took action. That’s the most fulfilling part of the job,” Cavanaugh said. “Nobody expects an EF3 tornado to go through downtown Little Rock, so it’s hard to mentally prepare for those days. If your team has been doing all the right things leading up to that event, you’ll have greater success. We can’t control the storms, but we’ve spent all this time practicing and preparing so we can tell people that it’s time to do everything we’ve been talking about for years. To see people come out of that alive because of the work of your team feels really good.”
Cavanaugh offered a word of advice to individuals interested in entering meteorology and weather-related fields.
“If someone wants to figure out what it’s like to be a meteorologist, I would have them contact me or our office to talk to some of the meteorologists here so they can get diverse opinions on how it impacts their lives. The last thing you want to do is get a four or six-year degree and then find out that you can’t work midnights. If that’s an issue for you, it’s good to know that four to six years in advance so you don’t waste time doing something that you might not be able to do or live with. You can eventually get a job where you don’t have to work those shifts anymore, which is something I’m lucky not to do. Otherwise, the schooling is very heavily math-based,” Cavanaugh said.
“Meteorology is just the physics of the air around you. Anytime you’re dealing with physics, it’s just the application of mathematics to real life, modeling everyday life with math. If you don’t like math, meteorology probably isn’t the field you want to go into. For students that have gone through algebra and trig, and if you have struggled with that, I feel that once you get into calculus, it shows you why you bothered to learn the other stuff. Algebra seems stupid and arbitrary, but once you see it used in calculus, you can start to appreciate it . . . Calculus is meaningful math. Don’t scare yourself out of it, but know that you’ll be in a ton of math courses, and it won’t be impossible to do,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh spoke on the importance of experience as well as STEM-based knowledge.
“If you know about the shift work and the math, it’s a matter of persistence and sticking with it, and when you’re in the process of getting your degree, if you want to work at the NWS, volunteer to work at an NWS office and get the same hands-on experience that I got when I volunteered. The volunteer work did more to get me a job in the weather field than my degree did. Don’t get me wrong, I needed the degree to apply, but volunteering helped me with the hands-on stuff even more. Nowadays, it’s not quite as difficult to get in, although it’s not necessarily easy. You just need one person to say yes, so don’t get discouraged by all of the no’s. One chance and one yes will get your foot in the door. I was very close to thinking that it wasn’t going to work for me, and I kept those channels open, and it allowed me to get in, to begin with. That persistence goes a long way in helping you succeed, as well,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh shared some of the life lessons that he has learned from living his life in tandem with the weather.
“I think it really all comes down to relationships. If you boil it down and try to figure out what leads to success and failures and good times and difficult times, it comes down to the relationships you’ve built in the course of your career. You don’t have to be best friends, but having a good relationship with your coworkers helps. Your colleagues will know you really well and be able to talk to you about everyday stuff from a mental health standpoint. It’s hard to take sick leave and plan vacations because shifts are strange, but when you have good relationships, it makes it easier for you to receive help and help others. As my roles and career have changed, those relationships have become a little more high level, but never any less important,” Cavanaugh said.
For Cavanaugh, this doesn’t just include weather watchers, but meteorologists and other weather professionals as well.
“Having a good relationship with broadcast meteorologists has been of critical importance. They have extremely difficult jobs in the local market – they’re responsible for conveying an accurate, informative broadcast in a way that is interesting and easy to understand. Their job inherently becomes dependent on popularity. Stations compete with one another. Here in the Little Rock area, we have four stations. I’m not competing with them, but when we issue warnings, it’s for an event that we think could cause someone significant harm or their life. If we don’t have a good relationship with our broadcast media partners about what we’re seeing – if one of those stations doesn’t agree with us, whether it happens or not, if any one member of that team of those four channels says something different, even if they end up being right, the people that lose are the people in harm’s way,” Cavanaugh explained.
Cavanaugh explained the social science behind the importance of harmony when weather forecasting.
“Social science research shows that if someone is watching a meteorologist and they hear a warning, they’ll start switching between channels to see if the threat is real and if they should do something. If one of those channels disagrees with the others, people will say, ‘Oh, thank goodness, I don’t have to worry about it.’ If one disagrees, they have less faith in the broadcast system and the warning system as a whole. People make decisions about whether or not to go into their storm shelters based on what the news is saying. It’s not any one station’s fault; it’s everyone needing to work together for consistent messaging. In 2023, things are much different than in 2005. In 2023, TV is the main source of info, but people are also getting notifications from their cell phones as well, so you have to make sure that cell providers are all on the same page. Some communities have outdoor warning sirens, and if a community chooses not to issue the warning siren, that’s a problem, too. That’s where you get another layer of potential communications to provide people with multiple rounds of information, but that also means that people are looking for multiple levels of confirmation,” Cavanaugh said.
This underscores the importance of relationships.
“The only solution to this insanely complex problem is forging relationships with the emergency managers and individuals in charge of implementing and sounding weather alarms, as well as other forecasters and broadcasters to talk to one another comfortably for that message to go out in unity when peoples’ lives are in harm’s way. Arkansas integrative warning team helps to streamline communication and issue warnings to everyone in harm’s way. This was especially apparent on March 31. Local stations were talking about the same thing at the same time, and once the tornado was there, they were all showing it from cameras and broadcasters and chasers on the ground. We ended up with no direct fatalities from that tornado, thanks to all of this broadcasting. Some of it was luck – a lot of people were at school or home, and a lot of places were residential. They were able to do something before the tornado hit, and that was a great success for all of our local broadcasters and emergency managers. It was a devastating tornado, which we can’t control, but the fact that no one died as a direct result is huge. You can see that in action on March 31. I see where things are going, and I hope those relations continue to grow as we move into the future,” Cavanaugh said.
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