Ever since a funnel cloud swooped down on her childhood home, Mishtu Mukherjee '90 has been intrigued by severe weather. Better known now as Mish Michaels, her TV career is a whirlwind in itself.
Mishtu Mukherjee's first childhood memory is captured in an old snapshot: a dark-haired little girl in a pink dress and white anklets, standing among the branches of a tree ripped out of the ground by a tornado. It was the day her big wheel vanished, too.
Five-year-old Mukherjee-known nationally to viewers of the Weather Channel's magazine show, Atmospheres, as Mish Michaels-had been in the tub that afternoon when her mother screamed for her to get out. She ran to the big windows in the living room-"I remember looking out the picture window and wondering why there was an ocean right outside when we had to drive to the beach," Mukherjee recalls.
Minutes later the tornado lifted and was gone, leaving a landscape of fallen trees and missing toys. Mukherjee and her parents quickly made their way to a nearby highway to help people out of overturned cars.
"Because nobody was hurt, it wasn't scary for me," Mukherjee remembers at having been submerged in the circulation of a tornado. "It was more like, 'Let's do that again-it was amazing!'"
So began her love affair with extreme weather. Yet to a girl growing up in the 1980s in Saratoga Springs, New York, becoming a weather forecaster just wasn't on the radar screen. By high school, Mukherjee had become weather obsessed-taking hourly snow measurements during winter storms, watching not one or two but three TV meteorologists every night before going to bed, and sitting in front of the window with a bowl of popcorn during thunderstorms, eyes on the sky.
But having never seen a broadcast meteorologist who looked like her, Mukherjee had settled for her other passion-horses-and had accepted early admission into the animal science program in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Her epiphany came one August night as she shushed her talkative high school boyfriend so she could assess the time between flashes of lightning and the boom of thunder.
"While I was counting out the seconds to see how close the storm was, I suddenly shouted, 'I know what I should be, I should be a meteorologist!'"
It hasn't been a cake walk.
Mukherjee's name didn't make it past the first day of her first job as weekend meteorologist and environmental reporter for a New Hampshire television station (WMUR). She and her mother picked Michaels out of the phone book.
Then there was being the only woman in the room at professional meetings. Mukherjee remembers clearly how her heart would pound and her palms would sweat when she raised her hand to ask a question or make a comment.
"An entire room full of men-150 or more-would turn around and stare at me," she recalls of the early 1990s. "They couldn't believe they were hearing a woman talk."
Mukherjee's hand kept going up, thanks to her confidence in the academic grounding she received at Cornell. "I could walk the walk because I had a solid educational background, I had worked hard, and knew I was doing the right thing-building a career I'd be proud of," she says.
Since those early anxious days it's been, she says, "a wonderful evolution." There were almost 10 years with NBC in Boston and then two years with the Weather Channel as a co-host of Atmospheres-a "very cool job" that gave her the chance to travel the world learning science hands-on: optimum weather for ice climbing in Alberta, Canada (zero degrees Fahrenheit), warm trade winds while surfing in Aruba, an ozone study at the Sphinx Observatory in the Swiss Alps, and soaring over lava spewing from a Hawaiian volcano. (You can catch the reruns on Saturday and Sunday nights.)
After more than a decade on the air, Mukherjee has broadened her scope on WBZ TV-4, Boston's CBS affiliate. (Boston is a meteorologists' mecca, sporting the country's oldest weather observatory and headquarters of the American Meteorological Society, the governing board of the science.)
Although she still forecasts occasionally on air and broadcasts during extreme weather events from the field, she is focused on developing in-depth weather stories for the station under the title "Eye on Our Atmosphere," recently winning a New England Emmy for one of her half-hour specials. For one of those weather specials, she chased tornadoes with a research team from the University of Oklahoma, bringing her in contact with an old favorite-a twister!
Mukherjee's efforts also center on developing a vision for the weather department's overall direction, particularly research and service to the community.
"I want to capitalize on our position as a public server, leverage the exposure we can bring to inspire and educate the public about weather in new ways," says Mukherjee, who is always keen to share her love of the science. The station's annual weather almanac, cloud chart, and conferences held in conjunction with Boston's Museum of Science are becoming staple fare for the city's weather-proud citizens. Mukherjee conducts research as an adjunct faculty member in the Meteorology Department at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell and, last fall, put together a weather observer conference to support citizen volunteers at work in New England. It gives her a chance to work with volunteers who are, Mukherjee says, "the cornerstone of our climate record."
And she volunteers herself. Mukherjee had a long-time association with the Big Sister Association of Boston as well as other organizations that serve girls and women in crisis. Since graduation she's also mentored Cornell meteorology undergrads and recent graduates. (Of the 48 CALS students currently majoring in atmospheric sciences, 22 are women.)
With only 10.6 percent representation of women in the field of meteorology (12.6 percent women in broadcasting), Mukherjee wants young women to know the score, while getting the support they need.
"As a woman, you have to run harder than your male counterparts just to be noticed," Mukherjee says, adding that she's had to prove herself over and over again. Nevertheless, the field is opening up (the pipeline of students studying atmospheric and related sciences is now 25 percent women), and professionals like Mukherjee want to be visible to those coming along.
"I want young women to seize new opportunities, knowing that there are experienced women who are here to answer their questions so they never have to feel intimidated, never feel like they're the odd person out."
The Atmospheric Science Major
About half of Cornell's undergraduate Atmospheric Science majors go on to graduate study at Cornell or other major research universities and then to a variety of academic, research, and forecasting careers. Other students find employment after graduation as weather forecasters in civilian and military branches of the federal government, in private-sector weather firms, or in broadcast meteorology. Still others are employed in environmental and engineering consulting firms. An undergraduate degree in Atmospheric Science is also good preparation for continuing study leading to secondary-level science teaching.
The Big Green Screen
When Mishtu Mukherjee '90 was a Cornell student, she would go to the WICB-TV studios at Ithaca College-script and visuals in hand-to try, yet again, to get it right. "Doing an on-air weather forecast is an incredible feat of coordination and I was just horrible at it," Mukherjee recalls of her days as the weather reporter on NewsWatch 16. "It aggravated me so much because I worked so hard and tried so hard and still I was pathetic." Mukherjee's early failures firmed her resolve to become an expert at on-air forecasting. Today, when you occasionally catch her on camera, the 2-minute, 30-second story of what's going on in the nine-mile-deep layer of constantly moving air and moisture that surrounds us appears effortless. Just consider what she's doing. First, she's standing in front of a blank screen called a Chroma wall (Chroma Key technology that marries two images was invented in 1950s Hollywood to save costly location shoots), watching herself in three monitors. Because the image in the camera in front of her is projected via a mirror, Mukherjee sees herself in reverse! With no script as a guide, she simultaneously moves back and forth, pointing to various spots in mid-air, clicks a button to change each graphic (she had created them several hours before), and talks off the cuff. All the while, the floor manager gives her hand signals that she has to read out of the corner of her eye, indicating how much time is left. After 13 years, Mukherjee, a three-time nominee for a New England Emmy for broadcast meteorologist of the year, still doesn't cut herself a break. "When I'm on the air I want it to be a stellar presentation that's fascinating and engaging and really takes people on an interesting journey through the atmosphere," she says.
- Metta Winter