Jill Szwed a ‘Weather nerd’ from Butler County
WILKINSBURG — The Butler Catholic School sixth-grader who kept a journal of the local weather for a month despite only needing data for a one day never stopped tracking atmospheric conditions.
She just got more technologically advanced, going from logging data in a journal to a computer, and using radar and a green screen to convey it to TV viewers in the region.
Jill Szwed is a native of Butler Township, and has been a meteorologist for more than 10 years. For the past two-and-a-half years, she has lent her weather predicting prowess to WTAE, and can be seen giving the forecast on weekend mornings and some other broadcasts throughout the week.
Szwed said being on air is an aspiration that also began in childhood, mainly because the news was always on in her house.
“In Western Pennsylvania, the news is kind of part of our culture. We like to know what's going on, we're a little nebby, in a way,” she said at the WTAE station Friday, Sept. 4, “and obviously with the weather, everyone is always interested in what's going on, which makes my job even more special.”
Szwed starts her day hours before she is scheduled to appear on a broadcast, so she can study the conditions of the day and get camera-ready alongside the rest of her peers.
Szwed said her interest in weather and science started in her years at Butler Catholic School, where she not only tracked the conditions way past the assignment, but made some science fair displays that continued into her high school years. She went on to attend Saint Joseph High School in Natrona Heights, where the “great blizzard of 2010” happened her senior year, further cementing her interest in meteorology.
She went to college at Saint Louis University in Missouri, where she majored in meteorology and minored in communication. She said it is a small school, which was a good fit for her having come from Butler, a relatively small city.
While science and the weather were some of her interests early on, Szwed said the on-camera part of being a meteorologist came from practice. She said public speaking did not come as naturally and her dance experience helped her get into the head space needed to deliver what is essentially a performance to people through the television.
She learned dance as a child at the SheLor School of Dance, where part of the training was to study all forms of dance, including ballet — her favorite — which involves a level of poise that Szwed compared with being on camera.
“Ballet was my favorite, so I usually had a ballet solo, which again, involved a lot of precision and intricate work with making sure the steps were correct and done properly,” Szwed said. “Standing in front of the camera under those bright lights could be similar, feel kind of like how athletes do that visualization. So, that kind of helped put me at ease in being in an unfamiliar place as I was learning that skill.”
Despite taking up only a few minutes of her workday each day, Szwed’s weather forecast is what all of her preparation leads up to. And contrary to what some viewers suspect, she and the other meteorologists at the station prepare their own forecasts, but not necessarily a script.
“We're kind of a one-stop shop, we're producing, we're arranging the forecast, we're delivering it and then also promoting it through social media and our station's website,” Szwed said. “You do have a remote control clicker, that advances the graphics that you see, but in terms of a script, there is nothing that we're looking at, it's all that prep work before the red light goes on the camera.”
Szwed’s desk is right behind part of the set viewers see on the broadcast, and it has multiple computer monitors that display different graphics relating to the weather.
The most important graphic is the radar, Szwed said, but she also uses other tools that measure air pressure, dew point, wind direction and more, which all contribute to the local conditions.
“I kind of think of it as building blocks in a 4D space, because we're not only looking at what's going on at the surface, but we also understand the entire column of the atmosphere straight up not just through the cloud base, but well beyond that, too,” she said.
Tanner Flowers, assistant news director at WTAE, said the storms that hit the Pittsburgh area and beyond the first week of September required coordination between the news team and the meteorologists, and Szwed was up to the task. He said her knowledge of the area also helped identify the areas that had the worst damage from the storm.
“Jill was quick to kind of identify some areas where we needed kind of help with the storm coverage,” Flowers said. “Jill does a lot of reporting for us as well, so we have quick conversations about her stories and making sure she gets the resources she needs to do the work that she does.”
Nick Matoney, an executive producer at WTAE, said the weather forecast is a paramount part of every broadcast, so the meteorologists have to be camera-ready. He said this is no problem for Szwed.
“It is the most important that we do is the weather,” Matoney said. “Jill is a master of that, not just in terms of the weather but in keeping us informed and making sure the producers and meteorologists work as a team.”
Gabby Barrett, another executive producer at WTAE, said Szwed is a friendly presence around the newsroom.
“The same happy, smiling Jill you see here is the same one you see on TV,” Barrett said.
Shannon Perrine, an anchor at WTAE, performed a mid-day newscast alongside Szwed Friday, Sept. 4. She said Szwed is more than a face you see on the screen.
“Jill cares about people,” Perrine said. “She’s a super scientist.”
It took years before Szwed could predict the weather for her hometown station, let alone in her home state. After college, she worked at a station in Clarksburg, W.Va. then at one in Lexington, Ky., and finally in Albany, N.Y., before finally landing a meteorology job at WTAE.
So predicting the weather has become more personal than ever.
“Earlier in the summer there was a tornado around Portersville ... it came out of New Castle into Portersville and Prospect, where my parents live, was right along the path,” Szwed said. “I couldn't let my emotions get to me too much, even though I wanted to step off camera and call my parents and be like, 'Are you in the basement right now?'”
Szwed said she balances her fascination with weather patterns with understanding that it affects people every day. But she does her part — Szwed said she is the first person called by the station when severe weather is expected — so she has found herself broadcasting outdoors in snowstorms, thunderstorms and during flood watches.
The severe weather that wreaked havoc on much of Southwestern Pennsylvania the first week of September had Szwed “nerding out” over the weather, but in a way that helped her understand and relay the gravity of the situation.
“Watching the storms evolve on the radar, again one of our greatest tools, as a nerdy person was very exciting,” Szwed said. “But you also put it into perspective of like, 'There are viewers, there are friends, there are neighbors who are in line of this storm.' So how can I deliver with authority and also changing your voice a little bit to say, 'We really need to pay attention to this storm, this isn't just a regular old severe thunderstorm that we get in the summertime.”
