Michael Fish is a homegrown meteorologist tracing his roots back to Fond du Lac. Ever since he was a young boy, his dad would take him out storm-spotting. This is when Michael realized studying the weather needed to be what he did for the rest of his life. This changed for a while when Michael attended the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for his undergraduate degree, originally choosing the career path of being a cardiologist. On July 18th, 1996, during his summer vacation from Minnesota, Michael was out storm-spotting with his brother on the outskirts of Fond du Lac. That day turned out to be one of the most important days in Wisconsin’s weather history. Armed with a video camera and an amateur radio, Michael saw what was going to set his career path away from medicine, but back to weather. On that afternoon, one of the most destructive, F5 tornadoes in Wisconsin destroyed the town of Oakfield causing $40 million in damage. Calling in the twister to the proper officials with plenty of warning, the people of Oakfield were kept out of harm’s way with no casualties and only 17 injuries. Consequently, Michael Fish changed his degree choice at Minnesota from medicine, to weather and climate.After achieving his degree, Michael moved to Milwaukee where he attends UWM to get his Masters degree in Meteorology. Completing all of his classes and having taught weather at UWM, he is in the process of finishing his Master’s thesis about a revolutionary technique on how to predict the sudden changes in weather around the world (also known as a global climate shifting.)With his Milwaukee-based education, Michael Fish received plaques for winning the National Forecasting Contest which is an international weather-forecasting competition pitting him against thousands of other students as well as professors from the nation’s biggest universities.If you can tear Michael Fish away from analyzing the latest weather data, you can also find him playing outdoors. “Fish,” as many people know him, can be found playing outside on anything from boats, Wave Runners, ATVs, or snowmobiles in Green Lake, or Wautoma, Wisconsin. As a lover of machinery, you can also find him with his nose stuck to pages of the latest car magazines.
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