MACOMB, Ill. (AP) — A Western Illinois University professor has won an award for the third time in seven years in a national meteorological forecast competition.
Marcus Buker is associate professor of meteorology at WIU . He placed second in the recent WxChallenge for forecasting weather in Nashville, Tennessee.
The competition requires forecasters from higher education to predict high and low temperature, maximum sustained wind speed and total precipitation from locations across the U.S. Buker competed against 200 meteorology faculty in the U.S. and Canada.
Buker says winning the award “takes a combination of forecasting skill, experience and luck.”
Scoring is done by assessing error points for the degrees of accuracy between the forecasts and the verified meteorological measurements.
Buker finished second in 2013 for Billings, Montana, forecasts and won an award in 2016.
