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Sunset for weather honcho: Gary Szatkowski retiring from Mount Holly forecast office

After 38 years, the local National Weather Service chief is hanging up thermometer.

Among career government employees, Gary Szatkowski is the anomaly: He isn't one to shy away from a storm.

The meteorologist in charge of the local National Weather Service office, in Mount Holly, is an acknowledged Twitter recidivist, and, yes, he admits that at times he has violated that elusive boundary separating officialdom and the rest of life.

"I think I've actually crossed the line on occasion," he said this week – at least once getting into hot water with the big boss. "Quite honestly sometimes I deliberately pushed the boundaries."

Soon, he won't have to bother pushing. After 38 years with the government, Szatkowski is retiring on May 27, five days before the start of the 2016 hurricane season.

It was a hurricane-turned-mutant – Sandy, in 2012 – that resulted in a career high-water mark.

While the weather service took hits for confusing the public by taking down hurricane advisories as Sandy became "post tropical," the Mount Holly office won praise for its simplified briefing packages, hawked on social media.

"Mount Holly stood out for its frank and persuasive language and effectiveness," according to the government's post-storm analysis. ("I told Gary he should just retire right now," former weather service meteorologist Tony Gigi recalled saying.)

Szatkowski, himself, took a hit from the head of the National Weather Service, Louis Uccellini, after Szatkowski went on Twitter to apologize for a busted snowstorm forecast in January 2015.

Uccellini, who happens to be one of the nation's foremost winter-storm experts, said pointedly at a public briefing that no apology was necessary: sometimes nature trumps science.

That episode hasn't stopped Szatkowski from tweeting, and he now boasts 15,000 followers.

In the fall he took to his Twitter account to rip Philadelphia Magazine publisher Herbert Lipson for a column he had written about the weather service's track forecasts for Sandy.

Szatkowski posted a sequence of track maps, showing that the forecasts were close to accurate, concluding, "And I'm finished with that guy!"

"l'll say I'm a public servant, but I'm not a doormat," Szatkowski said.

While not everyone embraces the idea of government meteorologists' taking to social media, Szatkowski argues that Twitter is a quite good vehicle for scientists, since its 140-character restriction is the perfect antidote for "death by words."

Similarly, the Mount Holly office has opted for simplified power-point presentations of its weather-hazard briefings, a la Sandy's. Szatkowski said that somewhat jokingly he has banned all words over three syllables.

He said that some weather-service offices had experiment with briefing videos, however, they encountered band-width issues.

A core mission of the agency is communicating hazards to the emergency managers who have to make the decisions to call in extra help, alert the public and evacuate people.

Since he isn't on TV (nor even sighted inside the KYW Storm Center), for folks outside the weather and emergency communities, Szatkowski might well be the most-influential weatherman they've never heard of.

Since 1997, he has been the boss in Mount Holly, the forecasting nexus for Philadelphia and all of eastern Pennsylvania, more than half of the Garden State and the Delmarva.

He said he is especially proud of Mount Holly's involvement in Philadelphia's heat-warning system, which has been held up as a life-saving role model by the Centers for Disease Control.

Szatkowski, 57, a native of Chicago and a veteran of weather-service offices in Oklahoma and Puerto Rico, came to Mount Holly from the Washington office.

He said that he likes the volatility and challenges of forecasting on the East Coast, and that he has made the requisite cultural adjustments.

Easterners, he said, are "a little more abrupt" than Chicagoans "in terms of 'please' and 'thank you.' Having an opinion is a residency requirement."

Szatkowski, who has a son living in Collegeville, said he has no plans beyond May 27, other than spending time with his 1-year-old grandchild. He said he and his wife like to travel, and for now he's not looking for a full-time anything.

"It's time," he said of his decision to retire. "I've had a lot of fun, a lot of hard work. I don't think that I've left anything here undone."

Joe Miketta, the warning coordinator meteorologist in Mount Holly, will become the acting meteorologist while a search is conducted for Szatkowski's successor.