Zach Tolby has over a decade of operational forecasting experience as a National Weather Service Forecaster in Reno, Nevada. He became interested in weather as a Ski Patroller doing avalanche mitigation along the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where winds regularly exceed 100 mph and snow regularly accumulates in feet.
For the last few years, he has been deploying to major wildfire incidents as an Incident Meteorologist, gaining first-hand experience with the challenges of forecasting weather on California “megafires.” Tolby recently accepted a new position as the Manager and Lead Scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s new Fire Weather Testbed in Boulder, Colorado.
His interest in communication and the social science aspect of meteorology led him to co-found an interdisciplinary team researching the effective use of visual, linguistic and regional approaches to probabilistic forecast communication. Their research group is currently funded by an NOAA research grant, “Employing Rhetoric to Improve Probabilistic Forecast Communication.”
An avid outdoors person, Tolby spends as much time as possible skiing, running and mountain biking with his wife.