John Wheeler

John Wheeler

Meteorologist

John Wheeler is Chief Meteorologist for WDAY, a position he has had since May of 1985. Wheeler grew up in the South, in Louisiana and Alabama, and cites his family's move to the Midwest as important to developing his fascination with weather and climate. Wheeler lived in Wisconsin and Iowa as a teenager. He attended Iowa State University and achieved a B.S. degree in Meteorology in 1984. Wheeler worked about a year at WOI-TV in central Iowa before moving to Fargo and WDAY..

Wheeler covers weather for WDAY TV and radio, as well as for The Forum and for inforum.com. Most meteorologists find stormy and extreme weather fascinating and Wheeler is no exception, but his biggest interest is severe winter weather.

Blizzards in March of 1966 and January of 1975 were largely stand-alone storms.
However, in the southern hemisphere, people see the moon upside-down.
Much of the southern and southeastern parts of the United States are set up to use electricity for heat.
Weather models are still not very good at accurately representing the intricate vertical layering of atmosphere.
Many long-term weather stations did break snowstorm total records, and many of the previous records were set in the Great Gulf Coast snowstorm of 1899.
California is typically desert-dry, except for the four months of December through March, which bring rain that is highly variable year-to-year.
The Great Gulf Coast snowstorm of 1895 left up to 30 inches of snow in and around Beaumont, Texas, and more than a foot and a half in Houston.
Record single-storm totals from across the Great Plains region suggest that snowfalls of up to four feet are possible, although rare.
In any given winter, the coldest temperatures have historically occurred any time between late November and the middle of March.
When making a post on social media about how cold it is here, the wind chill number is used much more frequently than the actual air temperature.