Chris Spannagle

"Innovative Weather gave me the experience that essentially I wouldn't have gotten until I started doing my first job. Dealing with customers, recording audio and helping to teach interns all helped give me the experience that I have been able to use in my current position as well as issuing alerts and 'warnings' for our clients."

Growing up, Chris Spannagle was always interested in weather. He remembers running to the window every time a storm would roll through, and he was constantly glued to the weather channel waiting to see the radar. As an adult, Chris worked with Innovative Weather from May of 2007 to October of 2008, and became the first employee at Innovative to graduate when he received his masters in December of 2007. While an employee at Innovative Weather, Chris preferred to forecast severe weather events. He says, "The biggest event I can remember working was June 7 and 8, 2008. There were numerous supercells and severe weather that lasted most of the day into the evening with 9 tornadoes, the largest hailstone ever to fall in Wisconsin and extreme straight-line winds. I was also working 2 days later when Lake Delton emptied out into the Wisconsin River." Currently, Chris works as a research meteorologist at the National Weather Service Warning Decision Training Branch and the University of Oklahoma/CIMMS (Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies). He got the position in part due to his time at IW.