SASKATOON EXPRESS - December 8-14, 2014 8, - Page Volume 11, Issue 48, Week of December 20141
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Lifelong love of weather
Quinlan brings science to his forecasts Peter Quinlan is the only weather anchor in Saskatchewan who is a meteorologist (Photo by Joelle Tomlinson)
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Madison Prosofsky Saskatoon Express
t all started with a little boy laying on a dock in southern Alberta. As he looked skyward, he was curious about Alberta’s always-changing weather systems. Unknowingly, young Peter Quinlan was taking his first steps toward becoming a meteorologist. He couldn’t possibly have known he would one day be forecasting weather for people in Saskatoon and area. Quinlan spent his youth in Lethbridge, where his mother was a doctor and his father was a fish and wildlife biologist. A love of the outdoors ran in the family. “We had a cabin in Crowsnest Pass that we’d always go out to when I was younger and I would always like watching the clouds,” he said in an interview on the set at Global News Saskatoon, where he is the
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weather anchor and Saskatchewan’s only meteorologist on television. In elementary school, Quinlan’s curiosity grew. He knew he wanted to be one of three things: a teacher, a weather person or an organist. Though he took piano lessons until Grade 10, he realized quite quickly that being an organist wasn’t the profession for him. Switching gears in Grade 12, Quinlan decided to go into pre-medicine studies at the University of Alberta (U of A). “I went to my mom’s med school reunion and I really liked to hear the stories of how they changed people’s lives and stuff like that. I was like, ‘Wow. Oh I could do that; that would be nice.’ Plus the reunion was at the Chateau Lake Louise,” he said with a laugh. In his second year at the U of A, Quinlan came to the realization that even though there was honour in be-
coming a doctor, he couldn’t get past the blood. He started exploring the world of weather. “In my second year I was taking anatomy and physiology, and then I took a class called Violent Weather, which was all about tornadoes and hurricanes and snowstorms and lightning and stuff. I was just fascinated by it.” Inspired by the class, Quinlan made one last switch in his education, moving from biological sciences to atmospheric sciences. It is a rare program in Canadian universities, and the perfect fit for him. In the summer after his third year, he had an opportunity to work with Environment Canada during a co-op program. After graduation, he applied to work there fulltime. “There’s this huge application process, so I applied and I had to go through all these things. You have to write an exam
and send in your transcripts and do a personality test. It was really intense.” Unfortunately for Quinlan and the other four in his graduating class, the federal government put a hiring freeze on Environment Canada in 2011. At a loss for what to do, he took an internship at a local TV station in Edmonton. Not really sure what to do with a camera in front of him, Quinlan was shown the ropes by someone who acted as his mentor. This would later be the same man who got Quinlan an internship, and then a job, at Newcap television in Lloydminster. Quinlan did more than weather at the station in Lloydminster; he did everything from shooting news stories to reporting them. “It was kind of like my little broadcast school that I was able to get paid for, so that was kind of neat,” he said. (Continued on page 4)
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