EVEN AS A BOY, HIS HEAD WAS IN THE CLOUDS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993                   TAG: 9302070093
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium
EVEN AS A BOY, HIS HEAD WAS IN THE CLOUDS
Pat Michaels leans across the table, hanging his head in mock shame, but grinning like a naughty choirboy all the time. "Yes," he confesses, "I was a weather nerd."
What else? Michaels grew up on a mushroom farm in northern Illinois. "You can see forever, because there's no moisture in the air." It also means the young Michaels could sometimes watch tornadoes spinning across the plains.
"The Chicago area spawns an awful lot of people who go into climatology, because it has serious weather," Michaels says. As a boy, Michaels kept detailed weather records. "I'd get upset when I'd go somewhere and my parents didn't keep my weather diaries."
When he was 12, he heard a news story about the Illinois state climatologist discovering something called The LaPorte Anomaly - meaning, it rains more around tall smokestacks. "The thought went through my head, `That guy has a really neat job.' "
In late 1979, Michaels' boyhood dream came true. The University of Virginia professor who held the job as state climatologist was giving it up; Michaels, fresh with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, was his replacement.
To some academic types, the job was too, well, practical. But Michaels, with his taste for the absurd (he doesn't say his father is dead, he says "he's been consigned to the atmospheric carbon dioxide load"), loved rooting through dusty mounds of weather records.
"Even when the guy called and says the Russians are jamming our weather, we listen to him," Michaels says. "And then there was the lady from Southwest Virginia who called and wanted to know when it snowed in March because that's when her dog got pregnant."
Every state has a state climatologist, but most labor in obscurity. Michaels, with his quick tongue, has a penchant for publicity. To news reporters assigned the dreaded task of a weather story, Michaels is a godsend, with a head full of quips and facts.
His colleagues often play weather games with him, testing his knowledge of obscure weather data. Ask him a question - and the odds are he'll be able to cite the date, place and meteorological conditions behind freak 18th century snowstorms quicker than you can say "state climatologist."
"I guess," Michaels says, "I'm an idiot savant."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB