AMR’s Bartow Weatherman Jason Bauserman Receives Award
The National Weather Service has awarded the John Campanias Holm Award to Allegheny Mountain Radio’s “Bartow Weatherman”, Jason Bauserman. Some of you may recall the story we did back in March of this year when the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Weather Program Manager, Andrew Beavers came to the Studio at WVMR with Jason to announce that he was nominating Jason for the award. At the time it was considered to be a great honor to even be nominated for the Holm Award. Well, Jason was selected as a winner of the award. We’ll let Jason tell you about it.
“On Tuesday, October the 25th I received a very special award” Jason says. “I’ve put in 25 years with (the) National Weather Service, and each year they can pick 25 people, even though this year they just picked 17 nationwide to receive the John Campanias Holm Award. I happened to be one of the very special ones that got picked.”
Jason lets us know just who the man was that the John Campanias Holm Award was named in honor of.
“He was a man in the U.S. that first started keeping (weather) records –not even for 2 years” Jason explains. “This would have been in the late 1600’s when he had these records. And that’s why it’s named after him.”
What exactly Jason did to earn this award is he has served as a volunteer “Cooperative Weather Observer” for the past 25 years. That involved a lot of dedication and a lot of sacrifice. Over the years Jason often missed out on family events and vacations because of his dedication to staying home to log the weather conditions.
Well, I guess all that sacrifice made it even more rewarding when Jason received that award from Andrew Beavers on October 25th, as is evident to hear Jason talk about that day’s ceremony.
“It was just a really great day for me” said Jason. “We had it at the Green Bank Observatory in the tour Hall, and it was exactly the right place to have this. I was just real happy that 50 people did show up that evening. All of my family was there. Nine grandchildren were there, and my wife. And I had a couple of classmates from Bridgewater College. My brother and sister were there and their spouses. It was just a really fun time.”
Jason describes what his 25 plus years of service as a weather observer involved.
“Each morning at 7:30 I write down the high temperature, the low temperature and how much precipitation or how much snowfall “ Jason says. “Then I send in those reports to Charleston first. But then all that information in these books is sent to the National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, North Carolina.”
Jason credits his opportunities over the years to share his weather data with the listeners of Allegheny Mountain Radio and with the readers of the Pocahontas times as helping him win the award. He estimates that he has done about 300 monthly radio reports and about the same number of newspaper reports over the years. Jason, who is fascinated with statistics, has calculated that there were nine thousand and one hundred days during his 25 years of weather reporting, and he has made entries in his weather books on each of those days.
The next big Weather Service Award Jason could qualify for is the Thomas Jefferson Award, but that will require 40 years of service as a Cooperative Weather Program Manager, and Jason would be 86 years old at that time. Typically, Jason says that while he would like to last that long as a Weather Observer and win that award, whether or not he will is –and I quote him exactly- “in the hands of the Lord.”
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