Kennewick teen a weather guru

Mark Ingalls woke up Tuesday morning, took one look at the barometric pressures over British Columbia and Hawaii, and knew a thunderstorm was heading toward the Tri-Cities.

He compared his findings with the data from the National Weather Service.

Then, shortly before 11 a.m., he posted the thunderstorm warning to multiple Facebook pages and his weather blog.

He also transmitted it to a national group of meteorologists, which published it on a website read by tens of thousands daily.

Mark is 16.

The Kamiakin High School senior is a young weatherman who recently became the first member west of the Rockies of Foot's Forecast, a national group of student and professional forecasters.

Mark's obsession with the weather started before he knew how to spell meteorology.

"I think it started when I experienced a hurricane and a tornado in North Carolina when I was little," Mark said.

Mark's father, Oscar, was in the Air Force then, and the family moved around a lot.

A year later, when the family lived near McChord Air Force Base, Mark already corrected the local TV weatherman's broadcast.

"I'd say, 'They're wrong -- it's going to be 87,' " Mark remembered.

He would see the Seattle forecast from the weather service and knew the difference in temperature between Seattle and Tacoma -- at 5 years old.

In the 11 years since, Mark has single-mindedly continued learning about what makes the weather. The science and math involved never felt like work to the teenage boy.

"When you love something, learning about it is not boring," he said.

He skipped wooden blocks and model cars in favor of science kits. His favorite Christmas present was a weather station that could measure rainfall and wind speeds.

That was busted up in a severe storm in Texas, another of several temporary home states.

"The tornado sirens went off and everyone ran inside," Mark said. "That's when I'd go outside."

By the time the family moved back to their original home -- the Tri-Cities -- late in 2008, Mark was ready to go pro with his forecasts.

He soon set up a Facebook page simply called Tri-Cities Weather. To feed it, he crunches the complex information from the NWS, mixes in his own observations and distills it all into precise little nuggets of hyperlocal weather.

"My friends tell me they all get their weather from my pages now, not from TV," Mark said.

Early this year, Mark added the blog Miz Weather -- mizweather.blogspot.com -- to his portfolio. It features short narratives about the next day's weather as well as pollen forecasts and links to national organizations.

One of them is Foot's Forecast, which Mark joined as the sole West Coast representative in April.

The consortium is named after Maryland science teacher Rich Foot, who started it in 2004 with his 10th grade students. It has since turned into a credible weather service, particularly for the eastern half of the country.

The group's mission is to build a national network of student and professional forecasters to provide precise, real-time and local weather information, according to its website.

So far, 40 students in 14 states prepare the local forecasts, supervised by 11 professional meteorologists.

The network is a training ground and a genuine weather service.

Foot's Forecast specializes in forecasts pinpointed for a specific area. The group, for example, provided by-the-hour forecasts for the exact locations of fireworks shows on the Fourth of July, Mark said.

It also supplied competitors in a boat race in the Atlantic with up-to-the-minute wind and weather forecasts.

But its weather reports aren't just about fun and games.

When deadly tornadoes hit the South in April, the web-savy forecasters in Foot's network worked overtime to keep people informed of the storms' movements.

The group has several students working in the region, but they couldn't keep up with the steady stream of vital information.

Mark helped out from across the country, summarizing data culled from the NWS and posting it on Facebook, where residents could easily get the latest updates on the storms.

After the winds subsided, many online thanked the students from faraway for coming to the virtual rescue. That's why Mark puts in the time and effort outside of school and play.

"I like when people can depend on my forecast," he said.

Of course he wants to be a professional weatherman in the future. But he will put a twist on a job that's rarely considered adventurous.

Mark plans to follow his father's lead, while chasing his own dream, too.

He will attend Columbia Basin College after graduating high school next year. Next he will go off on a mission for the Mormon church and study meteorology at the University of Utah after that.

Then he's going to join the Air Force, he said. Preferably as a special operations meteorologist.

That's someone who jumps out of a plane in a combat zone carrying a mobile weather station to send back climatic information to battle commanders.

"I could help my country and save up some money," Mark said. "After that, I can become a TV weatherman."

So what's a future combat weatherman's favorite weather?

"Tornadoes," Mark said with a wide grin.

* Jacques Von Lunen: 509-582-1402; jvonlunen@tricityherald.com

This story was originally published July 17, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Kennewick teen a weather guru."