UNIVERSITY PARK – Four Penn State faculty experts will appear this Friday night (April 18) on the ABC television news program “20/20” in a topical show devoted to wild weather and weather myths.
Sam Champion, weather anchor of ABC’s “Good Morning America” and weather editor of ABC News, traveled to Penn State in late March to interview the faculty members.
Faculty scheduled to appear on Friday evening’s program are meteorology experts Paul Knight, senior lecturer and Pennsylvania state climatologist, and Jon Nese, senior lecturer and a former on-air storm analyst on The Weather Channel; as well as Charles Ammon, associate professor of geosciences; and Kevin Furlong, professor of geosciences and director of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Environment Institute Natural Hazards Center.
Knight and Nese appear regularly on the 15-minute weather program “Weather World,” which is produced with by Penn State’s Weather Communications Group and airs each weeknight at 5:45 p.m. on the PCN cable television network.
Furlong and Ammon teach a course called EARTH 101, “Natural Disasters: Hollywood vs. Reality,” which uses movie clips about natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, floods and severe weather to examine the causes and consequences of natural disasters and also compare “popular media’s portrayal of disasters with perspectives from scientific research,” according to the Unviversity course de scri ption.
“20/20” airs on ABC Friday nights from 10 to 11 p.m. Eastern time.