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CENTRAL NEW YORK’S WEATHERMAN Jim Teske, the longtime meteorologist at Channel 9, says the area’s dynamic weather keeps him going By Ken Sturtz
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hen he was growing up in the 1970s, Jim Teske and his family ate dinner with the evening news on in the background. “And for whatever reason, I don’t know exactly what it was, I gravitated toward the weather,” Teske said. His fascination with weather was such that when he was 7 or 8 years old he started writing down information from the forecasts on pieces of paper and saving them in a little metal box. His first humble foray into weathercasting came when he was a student at Pine Grove Middle School in East Syracuse. Each day he would copy National Weather Service information from the newspaper and compile it into a brief weather report to read on the morning announcements. “For that 30 seconds, that was my little bit of glory,” he said. Today, Teske is Central New York’s preeminent meteorologist. He’s worked for NewsChannel 9 for nearly 30 years — longer if you count a high school internship — and served as the station’s chief meteorologist since 2017. Each evening viewers turn to him to find out if it’ll be nice tomorrow to do yard work, if their commute will be affected or how much snow they can expect. 32
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He’s still answering their questions all these years later and he’s still passionate about it. That’s partially because of where we live. Some regions of the United States have decidedly boring and repetitive weather patterns. On the Great Plains, for example, meteorologists often suffer through two- or three-week periods where it’s hot and sunny every day. “There are other parts of the country where the weather patterns are stagnant,” he said. “But here there’s enough variety, there’s enough change on a day-to-day week-to-week basis to make it interesting and to make it challenging.” In some ways Teske has never lost that sense of wonder about the weather he had as a child. Most people who become meteorologists can point to a weather event growing up that helped spark their interest in weather and forecasting. Although Teske had been drawn to weather early on, the snowstorm that hit on Christmas 1978 sticks out in his memory as something that fueled his fascination. There wasn’t supposed to be a big snowstorm, but that evening the rain changed over and the next morning they woke up to a foot and a half of heavy wet snow.
When he was in the sixth grade, Teske had to do a paper and research project for his English class. He chose weather for his topic. “I was still fascinated with the weather,” he said. “Part of it was growing up here and dealing with winter and snow.” Internship kicked off career As part of the project Teske had to interview someone. His parents helped put him in contact with Bud Hedinger, a popular Syracuse-area weatherman on Channel 3 who also hosted the station’s “Bowling for Dollars” show. Teske met Hedinger and got to watch him do the weather at the TV station on James Street in Syracuse. Five years later, in the fall of 1981, Teske was starting his junior year at East Syracuse-Minoa Central High School. H e d i n g e r h a d m o v e d f ro m Channel 3 to rival station Channel 9. Teske noticed Channel 9 didn’t have anyone doing the weather on weekends. “I think I got it in my head that I could do that even though I had never been in front of a camera or anything like that,” Teske said. Without asking his parents, the 16-year-old cold-called the TV station