by Miranda G. McLeod
Staff Writer
Ch. 4’s Chief Meteorologist George Winterling has been making the weather move in Jacksonville for 44 years.
He pioneered weather film animation by taking single frame photos and compiling them for broadcast. To show where drought areas were around the country, Winterling would put lighter fluid on glass, light it and take a photo. He was one of the first to use film animation for weather broadcasts and has seen technology change drastically over the years.
“I guess I’m getting to be the dinosaur because I’ve been in it since before computers. I’ve seen it change from film to videotape and now it’s going digital, which has changed a lot of the way we do things,” said Winterling.
His fascination with the weather began as a child and continued through his career in the Air Force.
“Growing up I was an outdoors kid. I lived by a river in New Jersey. I’d just stroll along the bank of that river and look at the beautiful sky and watch the riplets of waves coming across the shoreline from the boats. I loved to be around the water,” he said.
Winterling moved to Jacksonville when he was 10. He lived near the Ortega River where he would fish and again, watch the sky.
“If you’re fishing, you can’t help but notice the sky because if the water is calm, the water is as glassy as a mirror and you can see the reflection of the sky,” said Winterling. “I was always observing the clouds.”
Winterling served four years in the Air Force. When he joined, he said he really wanted to fly, but needed two years of college to go into cadet training.
“I had to study something. They showed me the list, weather was at the bottom and I had always wondered how they forecast the weather, so they sent me to school,” he said. “They taught me the different clouds. After I learned the different clouds and what made them and what they meant, it changed my life completely. I could never go anywhere without looking at the sky and understanding what the weather is doing and what the different cloud formations meant.”
He was then sent to forecasters school where he learned details about the atmosphere and how to read maps.
Winterling says he still gets an adrenaline rush over weather, and depending on its severity, especially when the weather team goes on “wall-to-wall“ — the time a weather warning goes up until the warning is over.
“We constantly tell people where the storm is, how bad it is, and the neighborhood that it’s in,” said Winterling.
He said keeping up with the weather is a team effort. He works with Senior Meteorologist John Gaughan who he says coordinates a lot of the team effort between the different meteorologists.
Winterling has been married to his wife Virginia for 50 years. They have three children: Wendy Gale, Jeffrey and Steve, as well as several grandchildren.