Meet Your Meteorologist: A Chat With Amy Freeze

By Marcus Gilmer in Miscellaneous on May 11, 2009 6:20PM

Several weeks ago, I tried to start up a feud with WFLD Fox 32 Meteorologist Amy Freeze to stir up some excitement in our Chicago media fantasy baseball league. Needless to say, Freeze stayed classy and didn't take the bait while we went on to split our first head-to-head match-up and my team promptly tanked. Amy has bounced around the country, reporting for stations in Denver, Portland, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia before winding up in the Windy City, having covered not just weather, but a variety of stories including the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

But Amy's not the stereotypical "weather girl." Freeze has the skills and knowledge, being one of a small number of women who have a Certified Broadcast Meteorology accreditation from the American Meteorological Society (she also has seals of approval from both the AMS and National Weather Association). Don't believe us? Check out her case study on the particularly nasty storms the city experienced in August 2007, Heavy Rainfall Events Continue to Overwhelm Urban Infrastructure. [Part 1 and Part 2, PDFs] We recently chatted with Amy about her background, Chicago's weird weather, and - yes - her name.

Chicagoist: You have a pretty varied background in terms of your career. How did you come to be a meteorologist?

Amy Freeze: Well, the short answer is: it was my last name. But the more lengthy answer is that I wanted to be a newspaper writer but when I graduated from college I got started at a TV station and I was a part-time writer but they decided they wanted to make me an entertainment reporter. That was my first on-air television position. Then the main meteorologist had to have triple-bypass surgery and was going to be out about six months and they wondered who they could get to do the weather. They thought, “Hmm, Amy Freeze. That sounds like someone who would do weather, you go do it.”

So I enrolled in an Introduction to Meteorology class at Portland State University and I spent the next four years getting a second degree in meteorology. As soon as I started doing it, I felt like it was my destiny.

C: This city is famous for its finicky weather and its weather extremes. How does it differ here from some of the other places you’ve worked?

AF: I think Chicago definitely has the biggest swings in weather. You can have the biggest swings in the shortest amount of time, from temperatures falling something like 40 degrees in less than 24 hours. I’ve lived in seven states and I can say that Chicago has some of the biggest extremes.

Looking back at some of the Mother’s Days for a report, in May of 1954, the Mother’s Day that year had snow, the only Mother’s Day on record to have snow. But in 1956, we had the hottest Mother’s Day on record at 89 degrees.

You know that saying, if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes…

C: Is that the most difficult aspect of being a meteorologist in Chicago.

AF: I think it is because if you’re not an actual meteorologist or someone who’s studying the weather on a daily basis it would be impossible to be successful at forecasting. If you don’t know what’s going on, it changes so much- It’s not like in California or parts of Arizona where temperatures day after day are almost exactly the same and sky conditions are exactly the same. So the changes make it difficult and the reasons we have all these changes is the latitude that we’re at and the position we have in relation to Lake Michigan.

C: What kind of misconceptions to you have to deal with from the public? I’m sure there are the people who blame you for the weather when it rains on their picnic.

AF: (laughs) Definitely don’t blame the messenger. I’m just bringing the weather, I don’t control it. Another misconception we deal with is the idea we take the forecast from somewhere else or we buy it from an agency. It’s true some TV outlets may buy subscriptions to AccuWeather or The Weather Channel, but for us at Fox, we create our own forecast, we have a team of meteorologists and contrary to the belief that we can get it wrong every day and still have a job, we actually keep track of our accuracies. All those things are important to us.

One more misconception, a more serious one, is that a lot of people believe Chicago, specifically downtown Chicago, we can’t have a tornado. They think because we’re close to Lake Michigan and we’re surrounded by big buildings that a tornado can’t happen in downtown Chicago but it absolutely can. Tornadoes can happen anywhere and climatology and science actually point to the fact that we’re overdue for a large tornado happening in the Chicago area. There have been some great studies and research done on it.

[Check out Amy's report on the subject, plus the original study and the NWS study.]

C: Run us through a typical work day for you.

AF: I’m the mother of four children so I get up at about 6:30 in the morning and I run - literally outside jogging - getting everyone off to school. In the mornings I’ll do a little bit of forecasting or maybe go to a school for a presentation or appearance that’s related to my job. I get in to the station at about 2:30 and that’s when we start creating the forecast. By about 3:30 or 4 we do promos, little teasers about what’ll be coming up throughout the night. We have a newsroom meeting where we brief the rest of the news crew on what kind of weather is going to be happening and how that might tie in to the newscast and that will help us know how much time we’re going to get on air that day. And if people are live in certain locations, we’ll let them know what the weather is going to be like so they can prepare their equipment.

By 5:55 I do my first, live-air hit which is a minute long. If you’re a fan of the show TMZ, it happens right after that (laughs), and from 6 to 7 I take a little break. At 7 is make-up and at 8 do a few more promos and teasers and the most important part of my day is the last 90 minutes, from 9 to 10:30 when the live broadcast is. I hope you watch the whole 90 minutes but if you don’t, the full forecast is at 9:15 and then again at 10:10.

C: You’re a marathon runner, too.

AF: Yes, I’ve run five marathons including the Chicago Marathon in 2000. I’m going to do a few 10 milers this spring. I’m going to do the Soldier Field 10 mile run and I’m going to do this really crazy race down in Joliet in July. It’s called the Warrior Dash, it’s like an obstacle race which I’m looking forward to. And maybe a Susan Komen marathon in October. That’d be my sixth and they’re hard. I’m definitely a recreational runner; I like to run with my friends at races. The things is that I’ve been more inclined to do out-of-the-ordinary races like the Muddy Buddy. A little more off-the-wall than your normal run-on-the-street things.

C: Oh, yeah, I’m running the Soldier Field 10 miler as well.

AF: Great.

C: Well, I’d go out on a limb and challenge you but you’ve done way more marathons than I have [I’ve done three] and in our Chicago media fantasy baseball league, I talked some trash to start the season and we ended up tying in our first match-up and my team has been pretty terrible so I learned my lesson to never taunt you.

AF: (laughs) Okay, good. I need a pitcher bad on my team.

[Note: As of Monday morning, Amy's team is in third place while I am mired in eighth out of 12 teams. - M.G.]

C: I’ve got to ask about your name. The ESPN Monday Night Football guys had a little fun with you back in December during the Packers-Bears game, they didn’t believe it’s your real name. Is that tiresome or do you just roll with it as something fun?

AF: I roll with it, I love it. It’s funny because the fact that people think I would choose “Freeze” is hysterical. If you were going to choose a “weather” name, you’d go with something like “Wendy Breeze.” But I like it when people say something about my name, like when I get emails like, “My husband and I are laying in bed, watching your forecast, and one of us says it’s your real name and the other one doesn’t. Which one of us is right?” Those are the best emails. I get those really frequently. Or “I’ve got a coworker, we have a bet going on…”