#Denver 7 weatherman ryan tv#

Ryan and the station’s four other meteorologists - all degree-holding scientists - are so heavily into this, they went out and got a NASA grant, the kind of thing generally reserved for university professors, to set up the News 4 Weathernet pages on the Internet. Then he was in his Bronco and on his way from McLean to WRC’s Tenleytown studios, where he logged 10, 12, 15 hours tracking the storm, talking to his 100 Weather Watchers around the region and checking readings at the 100 area schools that Channel 4 has equipped with weather-measuring equipment. Yesterday he was up at 5:30 a.m., doing a radio spot. Ryan, Channel 4’s weather guy since 1980, can’t get enough of it. He’s the one who, unlike his colleagues at the other network affiliates in town, decided to preempt virtually everything and go with weather around the clock. “It’s a shared social experience,” says WRC’s vice president for news, Dick Reingold. Then, when the big one hits, the four-minute forecast goes out the window and the audience numbers go through the roof.

#Denver 7 weatherman ryan tv#

Nowadays, TV stations pump millions into computer banks that generate dazzling color satellite and radar images and let the weathercasters draw wind directions on the home screen like God’s offensive line coach examining the next play. The days are long gone when weathermen just stood gesturing in front of a blank green screen while viewers at home saw the big old map of the United States. And if the surveys that are the lifeblood of the industry are correct, the broadcasters’ most effective lure is not the lurid coverage of pools of blood from the latest shooting, not the detailed analysis of each Redskins’ every twitch, but the weather.

On a normal, snowless evening, about half of the homes in the area are tuned in to one of the local newscasts. Now, the sound of a major snow is the easy, neighborly patter of Ryan, reminding us once more of his basic conservatism about predicting snow accumulations, recalling the names of the good rural folk who phone in their weather observations from Cumberland, Md., and Paris, Va.

Snowstorms once brought an eerie silence, broken only by the crunch of boots against powder, the ripping roar of great shiny mounds dropping from a rooftop.