Groundhog Day 2017 is one Janice Dean will remember over and over again.
Today, the Fox News senior meteorologist will be inducted into the Punxsutawney Weather Discovery Center’s Meteorologist Hall of Fame. She will also report live from the Punxtawney on groundhog Phil tomorrow. Dean, who infuses her weather segments with humor, focuses on the big picture during her Fox & Friends segments. “My work is a brushstroke of the nation,” she said. “When I get in each morning, I’ll write a weather note and let the producers know what the big story will be. I point their attention to big weather stories that are happening nationally.”
Toronto native Dean joined Fox News in 2004. A year later, she found herself covering one of the biggest weather stories of the last half century.
“Katrina is the worst natural disaster I have ever covered,” Dean told TVNewser in an interview Monday, “In addition to Katrina, we had Hurricanes Wilma and Rita that season. It was the busiest and most destructive hurricane season, I believe, we have ever had on record.”
Dean recently went back to look at the footage from that destructive year, which went beyond the alphabet the Hurricane Center uses for named storms when Hurricane Zeta formed on Dec. 29 and didn’t dissipate until early 2006. “Someone asked me whether or not I thought I had done a good job back then, and I told them that we did the best we could with the information that we had, and we made viewers aware that the warnings existed and they were dire. Every year seems to bring awful weather events, but covering Katrina was especially challenging.”
Dean also sees herself as a role model for future forecasters.
“As much as I love my TV job, I really believe I’m inspiring a new generation of meteorologists and people who are interested in weather,” Dean said. Her book, Freddy the Frogcaster is “a major reason why I’m being inducted” into the Punxsutawney Hall of Fame.
So, what will America’s most famous groundhog predict on Thursday morning? “I’m thinking Phil will tell us that Spring is around the corner, although I don’t want to step on his toes,” said Dean. “We have been pretty lucky because it has been a relatively warm winter so far. We have had some snow here and there, but no real big nor’easters.”
As for the real forecasting–the one done by computers and humans, Dean said: “Frankly, anything beyond a 7-day forecast can sometimes be a coin toss. I always say ‘take it with a grain of salt’ if we go past 7 days.”