JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – WJXT Chief Meteorologist George Winterling pioneered weather broadcasting with revolutionary forecast contributions which brought meteorology to mass audiences.
He died on the summer solstice of 2023, when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. It was as if he was ascending to the heavens, to be close to the weather he forecasted to viewers for nearly 50 years.
Meteorologist George Winterling was the first to provide weather forecasts to viewers in Jacksonville and helped invent the field of television weather forecasting before his 2009 retirement.
In 1962 he talked WJXT into needing a meteorologist to deliver the weather -- something unheard of at the time.
“I felt that the media needed knowledgeable persons doing weathercasts in times of emergencies,” Winterling said. “In those early days, I painted clouds on maps, since there were no satellite pictures available.”
In the early days, George designed and copyrighted the space-view weather maps to show viewers weather systems across the United States. He initiated predicting rainfall probability, and even chased storms and weather events, filming them with his 16mm camera.
He used that same camera to take single-frames to create animations to put the weather in motion.
George said, “Predicting a freeze in Jacksonville is very likely when anticyclones center over Texas in the Winter.”
George shared many old-school forecast map techniques like this with the team.
In the age of come-and-go meteorologists, knowing the local rules gives you an edge over the competition in predicting Mother Nature.
It takes decades to understand the subtleties of Northeast Florida’s microclimates and convective patterns and the analysis George taught me still holds up against modern numerical computer models.
And George Winterling certainly had the upper hand by inventing new methods, including what became the heat index scale -- one of his enduring legacies.
In 1978, George coined the term humiture, which explained the apparent heat a person felt by factoring in the humidity.
Winterling’s various assumptions about the human body factored in temperature and humidity, which gave a good estimate of “how hot it feels.” A year later the National Weather Service adopted the scale as the heat index.