It is with heavy hearts that we have lost our beloved former colleague, George Winterling. He died on Wednesday at the age of 91. Wendling was WJXT-4’s first chief meteorologist, a position he held for 47 years before retiring in 2009. He is considered a pioneer in the field of meteorology. He came up with the term “temperature and humidity,” which came to be known as the “heat index,” to better explain to audiences how hot it was outside.
He is the only forecaster to predict that Hurricane Dora will hit northeast Florida. Dora was the only hurricane to directly hit our area, making landfall north of St. Augustine on September 10, 1964, as a Category 2 storm.
Winterling became WJXT’s first meteorologist in 1962. He had previously worked for the U.S. Weather Service (now known as the National Weather Center Office) in Jacksonville, but switched to television because there were no weather programming available at the time that would allow him to be openly informed about the weather. Why.
“I know people — boaters, fishermen — need to know something about tropical storms,” Wendling told me when we interviewed him in 2022.
Realizing that the weather affects it every day, Wendling uses his creative talents to realistically paint a picture of what viewers should expect. He painted the clouds in white paint on the map used for the evening news forecast, and marked them with markers to illustrate the “felt” temperature.
He is a master at helping WJXT 4 viewers visualize the weather. He mounts the camera on a tripod and moves the image segments clip by clip so that it can be edited into a video to show the direction the front is moving. At the time, there were no satellites to collect data. So Wendling relied on Weather Bureau teletypes to update viewers on temperatures and impending storms.
He installed weather equipment on the roof of WJXT to collect his own data. But it was Wendling’s accurate coverage of Hurricane Dora that cemented his reputation. All other meteorologists predict Doral will miss northeast Florida and hit the Carolinas. Not George.
“I have weather instruments in the studio, and I can see the direction of the wind and watch the northeast. I know the storm is going to be south of Jacksonville,” he told me in 2022.
“I went old school. “The only way to tell a hurricane and its direction is by air pressure,” Wendling said.
