The professional challenges they face each day can be as changeable as, well, the weather to which they've devoted their careers. John "Jay" Grymes III, AS '79,'86M, and David R. Legates, AS '82,'85M,'88PhD, who are both based at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, initially crossed paths at UD in the mid-1980s when they were working on master's degrees in climatology/geography.

More than 10 years down the road, Grymes and Legates have found their lives intersecting yet again. While both are trained climatologists, their career paths are distinctly different.

Grymes has been at LSU since 1985, working in a variety of positions, including as state climatologist. And, when not on-campus, he can often be found at the WAFB-TV station, where he has a weekend gig as a weathercaster.

Legates, meanwhile, is an associate professor at LSU and a research scientist at the university-based Southern Regional Climate Center (SRCC), where Grymes serves as operations manager.

The SRCC monitors and evaluates climate-related matters in six southern states. It's one of only six such federally funded centers in the country.

"We cover Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas," says Grymes. "It's a pretty large area, and an area with a lot of interesting weather activity."

In addition to serving as a climate data archive and delivery center, the SRCC works directly with the state's Office of Emergency Preparedness to track threatening storms.

"We were heavily involved with Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Georges in 1998, both of which resulted in substantial coastal damage and several sleepless nights," Grymes says. "During Georges, I was really in the pipeline, doing 12-hour shifts for the local TV station followed by six-to-eight-hour tours of duty at the Office of Emergency Preparedness.

"David and I work together on many projects, but our overall orientations are different," says Grymes. "Climatology is a field that offers many different types of opportunities.

"People don't always understand how climatology differs from meteorology," he says. "The way I like to explain it is that meteorology focuses on what's going on in the atmosphere, and the specialty of that discipline is weather forecasting. Climatology, meanwhile, is more interested in how atmospheric processes affect what's actually going on at the Earth's surface," says Grymes, adding that his interest in the field was triggered by classes he took under John R. Mather, UD professor of geography. [Mather recently retired after teaching 36 years, serving 24 years as department chairperson.]

Grymes, who grew up in Wilmington, Del., earned a B.A. in biology, but was so unsure about his professional future that he took a job as a custodian in an area school until deciding to pursue his master's degree in climatology.

"Prof. Mather truly helped me get focused in terms of a career, and his guidance helped me realize that this field was a good fit for my interest and skills," says Grymes.

As Louisiana state climatologist, Grymes is responsible for providing climate data services for the state, including data archival, distribution, summary and interpretation. Frequently contacted by the press to comment on such weather trends as global warning, Grymes also has been asked to serve as an expert weather "witness" in court cases.

"I've been involved in several interesting cases, including many road-accident cases, toxic-release impact events and several 'who's at fault' flooding cases," Grymes says. "In most cases, the climate information is not the key, but it serves as physical evidence or as support to other issues.

"Weather-wise, Louisiana is an interesting region because it's at sea level," he says. "We make Delaware look like the Appalachian Mountains."

Legates, a native of Harrington, Del., who is internationally known for his research on precipitation, says his lifelong ambition was to become a meteorologist. By age 8, he was drawing weather maps and had established a backyard weather station, but he later decided to forego meteorology to study climatology. "Dr. Mather and Dr. Helmut Landsberg [of the University of Maryland] convinced me in 1978 that climate change would become a major focus in the 1990s and beyond. I have never been disappointed," Legates recalls.

Legates, who double-majored in mathematics and geography, stayed at UD for his advanced degrees because the climatology program was rapidly developing, with the addition of new faculty and the expansion of research activities. "There was always something more to learn, so I never left," he says.

Based on information gathered from about 36,000 rain gauges from around the world, Legates' doctoral research resulted in high-resolution monthly estimates of precipitation for the entire Earth-estimates that are still widely used as a standard to evaluate climate models and to provide input for water balance studies.

After receiving his Ph.D., Legates became first an assistant and later an associate professor with the Center for Computational Geosciences at the University of Oklahoma. There, he focused his research on the climate of the southern Great Plains and became interested in the use of radar to estimate precipitation. When the opportunity to work with the SRCC arose, he jumped at the chance.

Grymes, who this spring sat in on one of Legates' graduate-level classes, says that Legates' real-time use of radar data to track and monitor weather events will be a "significant development" at the SRCC.

"The growing technology is what's driving my science right now," says Legates. "Because of continually expanding computer resources, we're getting finer and more detailed analyses than ever before. And every round of re-analysis is done at a much finer scale. Climatology is a relatively young field and there are many avenues open for exploration."

Legates says he retains a strong interest in precipitation-based climatology. He recently developed a real-time system to monitor weather conditions for Duke Energy Corp.'s hydroelectric power generation process for the Catawba River Basin in North Carolina. By providing high-resolution precipitation estimates from weather radar, Duke now can model the water flow in the river basin more accurately and thus, better predict and manage its water resources.

With less than 500 climatologists in the United States actively involved in climate research, Legates acknowledges it was an "odd coincidence" that he and Grymes both ended up at LSU.

"And, we both agree that our education at the University of Delaware was the finest available to help us in our chosen field," says Legates, who recently accepted a tenured position at UD for the fall.

Legates has worked on global precipitation research at the German weather service in Frankfurt and twice has been invited to participate in U.S.-Soviet climate exchange programs. He recently served as moderator for a global-warming debate sponsored by the Houston Forum.

"When we look at how the atmosphere works, it's just not the atmosphere on which we focus, but how it interacts with the Earth's surface. Interactions with vegetation, lakes and streams, for example, tell us a great deal about the global climate," Legates says. "That's what makes climatology so interesting. We're continually learning."

-Nicole Pensiero