🎧 Click the red “listen” button for the full conversation with Reset.

WGN-TV Chief Meteorologist Tom Skilling made a name for himself as the gold standard of weather reporting during his 45-year career at the station.

He not only predicts the weather, but also helps the audience understand the science behind it. Skilling has guided Chicagoans through rain and shine, floods and droughts, blizzards and heatwaves. He’s chased tornadoes — and been chased by them.

Skilling has witnessed the city’s deadliest natural disaster, the July 1995 heat wave, and watched a Chicago mayor lose reelection because of inadequate snow removal.

Besides TV news, Skilling wrote a Chicago Tribune column answering readers’ weather-related questions, the WGNtv.com weather blog and more.

That experience and expertise, along with his clear enthusiasm for weather and how it impacts every individual, has made Skilling a household name in the Chicago area and earned him a stature — and salary — unmatched in the market.

“[Weather] affects our psychology, whether we can do our jobs outside, how we dress, how medicines work, even our mood,” he recently told WBEZ’s Reset about why the subject is so important to him.

Now, after more than 45 years at WGN-TV, Skilling will be retiring at the end of February.

“If you had told young Tom Skilling that he would go on to have a career in weather spanning seven decades, working in Chicago, with some truly wonderful people, I think he would be overjoyed,” Skilling said last year when announcing his retirement. “And that’s how I feel today. Overjoyed at the colleagues I’ve worked with, the viewers I’ve met, the stories I’ve covered. Overjoyed and grateful. I wouldn’t trade a single minute of it for anything.”

Skilling has always been fascinated by weather.

“My parents could never quite figure out what they had done wrong to get somebody so wedded to the notion that he was headed toward a career in meteorology,” Skilling told Reset.

Born in Pittsburgh, Penn., Skilling and his family moved to New Jersey when he was 2 years old. His father was a mechanical engineer who commuted into New York City, selling industrial valves to power plants and water treatment facilities.

A young Skilling, meanwhile, would look at daily weather reports in newspapers and by getting the Daily Map, produced by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, delivered by mail from Washington, D.C.

When Skilling was 14, he said, his father’s work was relocated to Aurora, Ill. and the family moved — which would lead to the budding meteorologist’s first job.

Skilling wanted access to upper air maps — which he said help meteorologists predict when a storm will develop — but the only way he could access those was through the Daily Map, which took longer to arrive in the mail in Aurora than it had in New Jersey.

“I wrote an eight-page letter [to radio station WKKD] out in Aurora, which suggested that if they could get me some current weather maps, I as a 14-year-old would do a better forecast for them in Aurora than they were getting from Chicago,” Skilling told Reset.

The radio station agreed — and Skilling’s career was born. He landed his first TV job at 18 at Aurora’s WLXT-Channel 60 and would go on to college at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Skilling started working at WGN-TV in August 1978 after stints at stations in Madison and Milwaukee.

During his conversation with Reset, Skilling reflected on how technology has changed over time, allowing meteorologists to create more accurate weather forecasts.

For example, the Doppler Radar — which can measure precipitation and help predict storms — didn’t exist in 1967, a year that saw a significant blizzard and tornado outbreak in the Chicago area.

“It was a different world … They did a respectable job [with what they had],” Skilling said. “Yes, they missed the snowstorm, but they did a pretty good job of forecasting the severe weather outbreak that included the Oak Lawn tornado.”

In the earlier days of his career, Skilling said, meteorologists would only get updated data about major weather events when they went on air around 9-10 p.m.

These days, reports are run every hour, allowing them to see if forecasts impacting millions of people are on track to become reality.

“It’s really been exciting to watch what’s happened,” Skilling told Reset. “Look at the accuracy in forecasting hurricane landfalls — and all this against the backdrop of climate change, which is ongoing and changing the way our weather is working.”

Climate change is a topic he hasn’t shied away from, even though some other TV meteorologists haven’t broached the subject.

Over the past year, Skilling spoke about climate change at several events in the Chicago area, including a climate conference in Naperville, and recorded a podcast with former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“In my early years, when I read a synopsis of climate change and what was supposed to happen, I thought, ‘Boy, you’re gonna have to prove this to me,’ ” he said. “The Arctic melting … what are the physics of that? Well, [the science] does work and … in my half-century of work, I’ve seen the atmosphere doing things I’ve never seen it do before. Climate change is real.”

Even as Skilling prepares to retire and slow down, he said he still plans to make learning and teaching about weather a major part of his life.

Skilling said he enjoys traveling to Alaska and Hawaii — and may even take groups on educational trips to see what’s happening with the climate in those two states.

“We’ll see — I’m wide open,” the longtime weatherman said about what else might await him. “I’ll tell you one thing: I won’t be content to sit around and watch paint dry on the wall.”

Bianca Cseke is a digital producer at WBEZ. Meha Ahmad is the senior producer of WBEZ’s Reset. You can follow her on Twitter @Meha.