Robert Daley

My name is Robert Daley, and I am a third-year undergraduate atmospheric science student here at UWM. I am from Waterford, WI, a small town about 40 minutes southwest of Milwaukee, where I have lived my entire life. As a young kid, I was originally frightened of severe weather, constantly watching for updates to the forecast on television and peeking at the dark skies out the window; however, all that time watching the weather instead made me realize how mesmerizing I found it. I was soon gobbling up weather documentaries and TV shows like Storm Chasers, and I loved experiencing the vortex simulator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. A few years later, I can still vividly remember opening the front door of my house on February 2^nd, 2011, only to see four-foot drifts of snow pressing against the glass storm door. The Groundhog Day Blizzard was the wildest I have ever seen, and that memory really stuck with me. Two months later, I also can still recall watching the Super Outbreak on TV, gawking at how the Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado stretched across the entire horizon as it passed by. Though I was still a bit weary of severe weather close to home, such as driving along the path of the 2015 Rochelle-Fairdale tornado just days after it hit, I was becoming increasingly fascinated by it instead. Now when the storms roll by, I watch them intently from the porch with camera in-hand, waiting to feel the wind and rain and maybe even capture that next perfect lightning shot. I started at UWM in the fall of 2019, shortly before the world turned upside-down from the pandemic. Two years later, I started here at Innovative Weather in the summer of 2021, and I cannot wait to experience more of this stage of my career. In my rare moments of free-time, I like to travel and work on my photography hobby.