For Ken Batty, the weather has always been more than a small-talk conversation starter.
As an elementary school student in the Philadelphia suburbs in the late 1950s, the approach of winter heightened his interest in weather, prompting him to spend hours outside his home experiencing new snowfalls and plunging temperatures, changing clothes when he or his parents decided he was getting too wet or cold, so he could remain outside as long as possible.
He was almost certainly the only grade-school kid in his neighborhood, if not in all of Philadelphia, to have his dad install an anemometer on the roof, with a line connecting it to a monitor box snaking through his bedroom window.
"You had to count the number of blinks on a small light bulb over a certain time interval to figure out the wind speed," Batty recalled.
As a junior high school student, he would make the occasional weather forecast to his classmates, sometimes based on scientific observations, sometimes not. One day at recess, he told his friends that it would snow the following day, "because there was a halo overhead around the sun," he recalled. "As was frequently the case back then, I was disappointed the next day."
It didn't take long for "Batty the Weather Daddy," a persona he dreamed up for himself during his junior high days (based on Philadelphia TV weatherman Walter Kinnan, known as "Wally Kinnan the Weatherman"), to decide that a solid, science-based education would improve his forecasting skills.
He went on to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in meteorology from Penn State, and began a career with the National Weather Service that would last 41 years, all of them served at the Charleston Forecast Office, except for a brief college internship in Philadelphia. Today marks the last day on the job for Batty, who is hanging up his barometer and entering retirement.
"I came to Charleston for the first time, as an intern, back in 1973," he said during a recent interview. "Back then, we were working out of an old Army barracks, off from the main terminal building at the airport, in space we shared with the FAA's Flight Service staff. The nearest weather radar was in Cincinnati."
After earning his master's degree, Batty was offered a full-time job with the Charleston Forecast Office and became the youngest employee on the staff.
"Now, I'm the oldest," he said. "I'm Batty the Weather Granddaddy."
In his early years at the Charleston Forecast Office, observations were taken manually, from a cluster of gauges and meters located along a taxiway. The Forecast Office moved to a building on a ridge above the airport's general aviation operation in 1979, and began operating in its current site, at the south edge of Southridge Centre, near its new Doppler radar dome, in 1994.
Early in Batty's career, forecasts were written on typewriters that produced coded tape, which was, in turn, fed into a Teletype machine and transmitted to forecast users, including newspapers, television stations and other news outlets.
"Now, you can see more than 40 computer screens in the office," Batty said. "All of our forecasting is now being graphically drawn, using the computers, and the words for the forecast are generated automatically."
The Charleston Forecast Office now delivers weather, water and river forecasts covering 49 counties across much of West Virginia and including a few counties in Kentucky, Ohio and Western Virginia.
"We're not a big operation, for operating 24/7, 365 days a year," Batty said. "It takes a real team effort to stay on top of things. We have about two-dozen people on staff, including a few technicians, but everyone comes in to help out with events like the June 23 floods."
Batty said the smaller size of the NWS station, friendly people, "a little slower pace of life," and an abundance of nearby woods and waters in which to enjoy nature all made him decide to spend his career in Charleston.
"I married a Charleston girl, our kids both went to WVU, and I will stay in Charleston when I'm retired," he said.
The area has produced a number of significant weather events during the course of his career, including the coldest month on record, in January 1977, the deepest snow depth in Charleston, 24 inches in January 1978, the November 1985 flood, the hottest day on record in Charleston, 104 degrees on July 17, 1988, the blizzard of March 1993, the Kanawha River reaching its flood stage of 30 feet in November 2003, the derecho of June 2012, and the lower Elk and upper Gauley reaching their highest stages on record during last month's flooding.
Since he arrived in Charleston in the early 1970s, Batty said, he has noticed a decrease in the number of days of thick fog, which he attributes to less air pollution, and an increase in the amount of time the dew point rises above 70 - the point at which air becomes so moist as to be uncomfortable to most people.
"For some reason, the summers seem to be getting a little muggier," he said.
"For a forecaster, every day is different," Batty said. "The secret is to know when to worry and get into high gear to bring people in and step things up. The evening of June 23 was one of the busiest times I've ever had here."
On most days, though, "people don't have to worry about the weather," Batty said. "There are just a few days a year that they should increase their weather awareness and take precautions. It could save their lives."
His career in Charleston has taken him through numerous changes in technology.
"I was born at a good time," he said. "I got to learn about and apply the old ways of weather forecasting - taking weather observations, doing hand analyses on big drafting tables and typing up the forecasts and warnings - and then learn the new ways. There's so much more data to look through in making forecasts today, which makes for so much more detailed forecasts and a public expectation for accuracy that is very high.
"But even with all our technology and all our help from our neighboring forecast offices and our national center, forecasting the weather in detail can be a humbling experience at times. You can really be surprised."
Batty said he will miss being a part of the Charleston NWS forecast team.
"It's hard to retire from a job you enjoy," he said, "but I won't miss the rotating shifts we all have to work. I won't have a hard time adjusting to a more normal routine in retirement."
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169 or follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.