Ken Haydu
Since 1994, Ken has held the position of Meteorologist in Charge at the Wilmington OH Forecast Office. The National Weather Service (NWS) office in Wilmington issues thousands of products each year, including warnings, advisories, watches, public and aviation forecasts, river forecasts, climate summaries and much more. The Wilmington office is one of the most active offices in the country in terms of severe thunderstorms and flash floods. Our area of responsibility encompasses 52 counties across much of Ohio, southeast Indiana, and northern Kentucky.
Prior to Wilmington, Ken worked at the Miami Air Traffic Control Center, the Miami Forecast Office, Hurricane Reconnaissance, and the National Hurricane Center, both as a forecaster and as a manager.
Ken has maintained a relationship with the Hurricane Center, having been detailed there twice to lead the NOAA-FEMA liaison team, which provides formal briefings to Homeland Security and the White House along with numerous other governmental organizations.
Ken graduated from Florida State University in 1978 with a Master’s Degree in Meteorology. His career with the NWS began in the fall of ‘78 at the office in Des Moines, Iowa.
Mike Hudson
Mike Hudson currently serves as the
Chief Operating Officer for the National Weather Service Central Region Headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. In this capacity, Mike helps to steer the direction of future operations of Central Region Headquarters and its 45 field offices spread across 14 states. Mikes serves as the region’s strategic planner and works towards services evolution by helping to infuse new technologies and concepts into operations.
During his 17 year career, Mike has been involved in numerous strategic planning and service evolution concepts, highlights of which include both the development of an agency Internet corporate image, the deployment of a modernized NOAA Weather Radio system, and participation on strategic planning teams. Mike recently completed a 10-month detail at NWS Headquarters developing the Services Plan of the NWS’ Weather-Ready Nation Roadmap.
Mike’s professional interests include studying severe weather, conducting outreach and education, infusing social science into the National Weather Service, and leading change. 
Mike is a fellow of the 2008 American Meteorological Society’s Summer Policy Colloquium, and he has also participated in several activities related to the Weather and Society/Integrated Studies program.
Mike graduated in 1993 from the University of Kansas with a Bachelors Degree in atmospheric science. His tour of duty has led him to five different duty stations where he has built a diverse background of experiences.
Jim Noel
J
im Noel is currently the Service Coordination Hydrologist at the NOAA/National Weather Service’s Ohio River Forecast Center (OHRFC). His duties include increasing interaction with OHRFC’s partners and customers on the products and services we provide. In addition, this newly created position at the RFC’s is designed to help improve existing products and develop new products with our partners.
Jim has served at the OHRFC since 1996 as a hydrologist with a departure to NWS Weather Forecast Office Atlanta as the Senior Hydrologist between 2000 and 2005.
Besides operational hydrologic forecasting, his main areas of focus are in precipitation forecasting, climate forecasting, research and water resources outlooks. He teaches climate variability and change seminars and rainfall forecasting seminars for NOAA and COMET. He is currently working with others on expanding the NOAA/NWS water resources outlooks to the national stage.
His B.S. degree in meteorology is from Northern Illinois University and additional studies in soil science, hydraulics and civil engineering are from Ohio State University.
Chris Novy
Chris graduated with BS/MS degrees in Public Safety (Law Enforcement) from Southern Illinois University. He is also a HAM radio operator since the early '80s. His call sign is WA9V.
Chris presently works as Assistant Chief Engineer for Fox25/CW34 in Oklahoma City.
He has been involved with emergency management since 1980 in storm spotting, communications, and safety training.
He is technically a storm chaser but prefers the low stress of spotting and being close to home when severe weather strikes. Chris had a very close encounter with an EF-5 tornado on May 24th, 2011 and lived to tell the tale.
Chris volunteers and is very active at the local no-kill animal shelter and has 12 cats of his own.
Stu Ostro
More than 30 years ago while attending Penn State University, Stu began delivering weather forecasts to the public, via radio stations served by the university's campus weather service.
Upon receiving his B.S. in Meteorology, his professional career began at AccuWeather as a forecaster, then a senior forecaster. His responsibilities included delivering weather forecasts on radio stations, as well as providing predictions to clients in the television, utility, and ski industries.
Since 1989 Stu has been with The Weather Channel, and his current duties as Senior Director of Weather Communications and Senior Meteorologist include leading TWC’s team of weather experts; being the lead forecasting consultant for deploying live field crews; posting frequent weather updates and insights for his many followers of his TWC Facebook fan page and on Twitter; being a featured contributor to The Weather Channel blog on weather.com; and making occasional appearances on camera.
An additional focus of his in recent years has been identifying connections between global climate change and smaller-scale weather patterns.
Stu has helped develop content for The Weather Channel preparedness initiative WeatherREADY and content for numerous other projects, including serving as a meteorological advisor for shows such as “Storm Stories.” He has given many talks to the public, TV meteorologists, other scientists, and emergency managers.
Tim Samaras
Mr. Tim Samaras has led, designed, and fielded complex instrumentation research efforts over the past 30 years. More notably he has participated in the TWA crash investigation by performing numerous scale model fuel tank explosions, the Oklahoma City bombing, and studying new techniques of explosive countermeasures. Samaras' background includes extensive research work in energetic materials including velocity measurement within explosives, blast pressure, high-speed acceleration, and stress/strain measurements.
Mr. Samaras is considered an expert in high-speed camera imaging, utilizing photographic techniques that captures imagery to over 1 million frames per second. Samaras's work has been recognized by The National Geographic Society, which awarded him the honor of 'Emerging Explorer' in 2005 for his research studies of tornadoes. Samaras has designed instrumented probes to measure the pressure drop of tornadoes for measurements of tornado strength.
These hardened probes are designed to be placed in the paths of tornadoes, thus the tornado passes over the top for numerous precision measurements including static pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction.
One such measurement includes a 100 millibar pressure drop in aviolent tornado in South Dakota on June 24th, 2003. To date, Samaras is the only individual ever to accomplish this task. In the past few years, he has been the field coordinator for TWISTEX (Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in-near Tornadoes EXperiment) in the pursuit of gaining a better understanding of the near-surface internal tornado environment and insight into the thermodynamic and kinematic conditions in the proximity of tornadoes.
Samaras has also been heading summer season campaigns to capture lightning on ultra high speed video to better understand the attachment point of the stepped leader/return stroke. Finally, he as recently co-authored with Steven Bechtel the book Tornado Hunter which is published by National Geographic.
More recently, Samaras has been one of the researchers featured on the hitDiscovery Channel 'Storm Chasers' where camera crews follow Samaras into tornado alley to capture his endeavors on-camera.