He’s been a weather watcher since he was a child.
“Been that way since I was 10 years old,” says Carl Sonnichsen.
“I used to cut weather maps out of newspapers and piece them into a journal and record weather forecasts on television.”
Never made a career out of it though.
Just a hobby.
Although once he had a part-time gig once with the surface weather observation station at the airport in Nain, Labrador.
He lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay now, a long way from his childhood home in Connecticut.
He’s been interested in the north for a long time.
Chance brought him here.
“It kind of just happened. My family and my wife’s family both had spent a lot of time working with indigenous people so that drew me here as well.”
All the extreme weather in Labrador doesn’t hurt either and keeps him busy.
When pressed as to why he has such an interest in the topic of weather, Sonnichsen said it has always been that way.
“I don’t really know why.”
Probably has to do with the patterns.
“I like organizing data.
“Even with finances, I like tracking that, there’s something there. I just like seeing patterns over time."
He gets data from his weather station daily and interprets some of it manually, like snow depth. Of course some weather is harder to interpret. Like precipitation.
“When it starts to rain, that’s a lot of math. It’s a whole different ball game.”
He doesn’t predict weather, just keeps track of it with a weather station he has set up in town. He posts it all on his site, www.goosebayweather.com.
“Some people have told me it’s hard to read, with all the data,” he said with a laugh. “But if you’re into weather you just follow the lines.”
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