The weather man
Jim Cantore is the face of hurricane season
BY JEFF CULL jcull@florida-weekly.com

PHOTO FLORIDA WEEKLY Jim Cantore, the Weather Channel's storm tracker, in Fort Myers recently to speak about hurricane preparation.

The Weather Channel's "storm tracker" Jim Cantore has been called the "human hurricane magnet." Often, when he shows up at the site of a storm, local residents begin to boo and yell for him to get out of town.

Somehow, they blame him for nature.

But he takes it in stride.

"You just realize it's part of the game," he said recently on a stop in Fort Myers. "I don't like that I'm the center of their distain. It's not a pretty sight sometimes."

Cantore is a pro that reports the weather without the melodrama that network news seems to inject. He's a meteorologist by training and an admitted weather junkie.

"We want to tell the story, not be part of it," he said.

Cantore has reported on many of America's worst disasters from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Charley in 2004 to severe ice storms in New England to blizzards in Chicago.

He's been awarded NOAA's David Johnson Award for innovative use of satellite imagery. He joined the Weather Channel in 1986 fresh out Vermont's Lyndon State College.

And with weather now hip, Cantore's become an icon. (He said his 11-yearold son doesn't watch Sponge Bob, he's watches the Weather Channel.) But a little luck never hurts.

When Hurricane Charley was barreling down on Florida's west coast, most weather watchers were hunkered down in Tampa. That's where the experts said the storm would hit. But Cantore had stationed himself on Sanibel Island. Charley turned east and made landfall on Captiva Island, just to the north. And there was Cantore, right in the center.

Still, the hardest part of his job, he said, is not really knowing.

"We're never really sure what's going to happen," he said.

That's why preparation is so important, he said.

Yet, if you're at Southwest Florida International Airport and you see this weather guru, you best start thinking of heading for the hills. Chances are a big storm is coming.