Behind The Mic: Meteorologist Ed Kieser returns to Illinois Public Media

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Reginald Hardwick: From Illinois Public Media News, I'm Reginald Hardwick. If you're a longtime listener to IPM, your ears were not deceiving you when you heard meteorologist Ed Kieser giving the forecast on Friday. He and meteorologist Andrew Pritchard are now working together as a team to give daily weather information and a break-in when that weather turns to an emergency situation. Ed joins me now. Welcome back, Ed.

[00:00:25]
Ed Kieser: It's great to be here.

[00:00:26]
Reginald Hardwick: And exactly what will you be doing?

[00:00:29]
Ed Kieser: Well, I retired from full-time employment at the end of last summer and was back visiting with people and talked to Andrew Pritchard back last fall and then, you know, said, you know, I'm free now, you know, and he said, great, because I think we want to expand our team a little bit to help cover, especially during severe weather. As many know, Andrew goes out in the field to cover severe weather. He's a seasoned storm chaser and it's a little hard to do both. And also in his full-time job, he does a lot of traveling in the winter. So started to talk and now we've landed here and it's great.

[00:01:17]
Reginald Hardwick: And I know you filled in last Friday. Tell us what you'll be doing during the summer and then what you'll be doing in January.

[00:01:25]
Ed Kieser: Well, in the summer, I'm mainly going to be filling in when Andrew is taking a few days off and maybe working on some other projects. And then once we get to that winter time when Andrew is traveling a lot, I'll be on the air on a more regular basis in the mornings. And the other thing I'll be doing, of course, is covering severe weather when it happens. Hopefully, we don't have much more. It's already been a record year for tornadoes in Illinois, so it would be great to have the weather settle down a little bit, but if there's more severe weather to handle, our team will be doing that.

[00:02:02]
Reginald Hardwick: And for folks who may be new to the area, what did you do previously at WILL radio and TV?

[00:02:10]
Ed Kieser: Well, I was a full-time chief meteorologist at WILL from September of 1987 on into 2010. So about 23 years, and most of that time was devoted to the radio, mainly mornings and middays, and then starting in about 2002, we did launch a television show called Your Weather on the evenings on WILL TV, and that lasted until 2010. So we had a pretty extensive weather presence during that time. So it's great to be building back the weather reputation that we developed over many years.

[00:02:56]
Reginald Hardwick: And just for transparency's sake, you do not live in central Illinois currently.

[00:03:01]
Ed Kieser: Right. That is correct. I moved to Columbus, Ohio, after my time with WILL and my wife had a job in central Ohio, so that's why I moved to the Columbus area. And I now have two children in high school here. So the plan right now is to see that through, at least, so I am working remotely. The last full-time job I had, I was working for electric companies in 11 different states. So I've been covering severe weather in a lot of areas for a long time. So it does work, it does work well, and in some cases it works even better than being there because when the storm hits, if you're not where the storm hits, that's actually an advantage. You still have your power and all of that.