National Weather Service's Upton office resumes tours after 10-year hiatus

Meteorologists are having a moment.

This summer, millions of Americans have packed into movie theaters for “Twisters,” the film based on a meteorologist chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma.

And on Sunday, the National Weather Service’s Upton location opened its doors to the public for a series of tours. The meteorologists, dressed in neon green polos and khaki pants, were the unassuming stars of the show.

“Our mission is to protect lives and property,” said meteorologist Dominic Ramunni. “We are the ones sounding the alarm. If there’s a tornado in the middle of the night, someone needs to sound that alarm, and that’s going to be coming from us.”

This was the National Weather Service’s first open house at the Upton office since 2014, with budget issues and the pandemic putting a halt to what had been an annual tradition. The office is responsible for New York City and the surrounding area. 

Ross Dickman, meteorologist-in-charge of the office, said about 1,500 people  from Long Island, the Hudson Valley, New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut attended tours on Sunday. The office is on the property of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and after guests parked they were shepherded on yellow school buses about a mile across the sprawling lab grounds.

“If you don’t do outreach, complacency develops,” Dickman said. “If you don’t teach people about what a hurricane can do and its impacts, and all the hazards associated with hurricanes, they hear about hurricanes, but they don’t understand what those impacts might look like.”

That point was underscored by Sunday's forecast, with Tropical Storm Debby expected to intensify into a hurricane in Florida. The weather event was not expected to reach the Northeast, but on Sunday, the skies were gray over the Upton office, with intermittent drizzling. 

Ramunni, who is in his fourth year with the weather service, was responsible for walking attendees through the operations floor, where he and his colleagues watch radars and make forecasts.

He also presented the “weather balloon,” which gets released into the atmosphere, around 100,000 feet high, and sends weather data down to a computer on the ground. The tours concluded with a live weather balloon launch. 

Ramunni said becoming a meteorologist was a natural career path after a childhood spent fascinated by the weather. He described himself as a “weather weenie.”

“Everybody that works here is a weather weenie at heart,” Ramunni said. “Everyone will tell you the same thing. … They have some sort of childhood connection to the weather, and since then we’ve kind of driven those passions into here.”

Scott and Karen Lancia, of Farmingville, took a tour in part to see their daughter, Allison, who works as an intern at the weather service. Now 20, Allison Lancia's interest in weather dates  to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Karen Lancia said, when a tree fell onto their home while the family was inside.

“I think she was afraid, and like, knowledge helped her not be afraid,” Karen Lancia said. “We were in the next room. It was crazy.”

The Lancias recently saw “Twisters,” which their daughter had told them was an overly dramatized representation of her day-to-day experience, with its glitzy technology and sprawling Manhattan office.

Even still, Karen Lancia said, it was “wild” seeing her daughter in her element.

“Not everyone knows what they want to be when they’re young,” she said.

Then again, not everyone is cut out to be a “weather weenie.”

“There was a big storm in 2001. I was an 8-year-old. I was expecting 3 feet of snow. But we didn’t get any snow,” Ramunni recalled, frustration in his voice. “It’s a historical bust from this area. It’s like, ‘Why did that happen?’ ”

By Joshua Needelman

joshua.needelman@newsday.com

Joshua Needelman covers the Town of North Hempstead for Newsday. A Long Island native and University of Maryland graduate, his work has appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post.