Pen State Meteorology wins third straight national forecasting title

For the third straight year, a team of Penn State students captured first place in the Weather Challenge, a North American collegiate weather forecasting competition.

Members of Penn State's 2013-14 Weather Challenge championship team.Penn State's forecasters bested teams from more than fifty other universities.  The top five Penn State forecasters were undergraduate students Matthew Strauser, Joseph Carolan, and Bradley Yehl, and graduate students Cory Baggett and Stephanie Hay. Their names will be engraved on the Weather Challenge trophy which will reside at Penn State during the 2014-15 academic year.

Baggett finished second overall among all forecasters nationwide and first among all graduate students, while Hay finished sixth in the graduate student category.  Yehl and Carolan finished fourth and fifth among all junior and senior forecasters, while Strauser earned the top score among freshmen and sophomores.  Four other Penn State students - Hunter Williams, Christopher Stickney, Michael Priante, and Sean Romeo - finished in the top ten in that category, so Penn State had five of the top ten forecasters among all freshmen and sophomores natinowide.

During the twenty-week forecasting contest that ran from September to April, students predicted high and low temperatures, precipitation, and wind speeds at ten different cities.  Some of this year's forecast locations included  Cheyenne, WY, Houston, TX, Atlanta, GA, and Fairbanks, AK.  SUNY-Albany finished second overall in the forecasting competition, followed by Georgia, Georgia Tech and MIT.