Glen, who grew up in Trenton and graduated from Trenton High School, is a sort of weather guru in this area, using his experience and computer models to pretty accurately predict what it’s going to do outside. His interest in weather is apparently innate.
“I don’t really know when I got so interested in weather,” he explained. “But I do remember that it was about second grade when I started talking about weather a lot. Part of that was just the scientific side of it. I’ve always wanted to know why it did what it did.”
In 2007 he bought his first weather station – a machine that tracks temperature, wind speed, precipitation, etc.- noting that Trenton did not have one at the time. Later, he purchased a professional weather station and that’s what he uses today to obtain data. He provides that information to the Republican-Times each day for use in the newspaper. He also lets Kansas City media outlets know what’s going on in Trenton, noting that there was a time when they didn’t seem to ever cover weather north of Highway 36.
Glen’s real gift to the community is predicting the weather. He uses the models found on the website “Pivotal Weather” to help determine what’s about to happen. While anyone can view the site, he said it takes experience to understand what the models are saying and to determine which of the models have been accurate in the past. The same thing is true for all of the weather “apps” that can be found on smartphones.
“These are all just computer generated models – there is no human looking at it to see if it’s a bad computer model. For instance, Trenton sits in a bowl, so we’ll get freezing rain when it shows that the temperature will be 34. It takes a human to know Trenton is going to be a little bit colder than the area around us,” he explained. “The other side of that is that with today’s technology, everyone wants to know the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute forecast. They want to know what the exact temperature is going to be at 4 o’clock. More often than not, we can’t do that.”
Glen, who has had his Ham radio operator’s license since he was 16, has learned a lot looking at those models and studying Trenton’s historical weather data. He knows, for instance, that a storm that develops north of Maryville could spell trouble for Trenton. Four of this area’s five tornados came through that corridor, he said, the exception being one that developed southeast of Laredo and eventually struck the elementary school in Humphreys.
“When I hear there’s a storm developing north of Maryville, it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck,” he said. “There’s a corridor that runs from north of Maryville through Bethany to Grundy County that brings bad weather. Every major storm we’ve had has come down through that corridor.”
One of those storms was the March 2014 tornado that destroyed the home of Larry and Karen Bailey near Tindall. While radar showed a storm developing and heading toward Grundy County, he credits the use of good old-fashioned storm spotters for providing the warning that it was actually producing a tornado.
“If not for the storm spotters, we would not have known that it was actually producing a tornado,” he explained, noting that radar has its limitations when it comes to showing what is happening closer to the ground. He said that’s one reason he tries to offer storm spotter training each year as part of his duties as Grundy County Emergency Management Director. He was honored by the National Weather Service in 2010 with the NOAA Environmental Hero Award for his work as a storm spotter.
While tornado season is undoubtedly exciting for someone fascinated with weather and predicting it, Glen’s most memorable weather events did not involve tornados. He recalls one time when he was shoveling a neighbor’s sidewalk and it was warm enough that the snow was starting to melt. But by the time he got to the end of the block, the wind had shifted and the temperature dropped to minus 2.
“They had to close Hy-Vee that afternoon because their parking lot became a sheet of ice,” he recalled.
Another of his most memorable weather events is the hail storm of May 2004. That storm left massive damage in its wake, including 18 broken windows at the Grundy County Courthouse. Briggs said he was in his apartment trying to direct storm spotters but had to hand that job off to Chillicothe because the hail was so loud on his roof that he couldn’t hear anyone.
Social media has given Glen a way to share his interest and expertise in the weather. He posts on his Facebook page what the models are saying and what his thoughts are about what could happen. He puts a little warning out there if things could get dicey later in the day or gives everyone a thumbs up to plan a picnic for the weekend because everything looks okay in Trenton. He said a good storm always brings new Facebook “friend” requests. You can watch him hit the streets in his car on Facebook Live to see the current conditions. Occasionally, he decides even he should be watching the weather from home.
“We tell people ‘don’t go out’, but we all want to know what it’s like out there. So, you can just pull up my Facebook page if I’m going live and see that the roads really do suck!” he laughed before turning more serious. “The most important thing is knowledge: what it’s going to do and why. People who are uninformed tend to make bad decisions. But having said that, a couple of times it wasn’t safe for me to be out.”
Glen said he was out and about during the flooding that hit Trenton in September 2017 and decided he better get off the roads. He ended up spending the night in the basement of the Trenton Fire Depart-ment, watching the storms and taking reports of flooded roads. Staying up all night during a storm is not unusual. If he knows there’s a good possibility of a storm overnight, he often tries to nap a little when he gets home from his job as custodian at the courthouse.
He admits that weather gives him an adrenaline rush.
“Who wouldn’t get an adrenaline rush from predicting the future?” he said, and defends the accuracy of weather predictions over the course of time.
“I tell people to try to pick the lottery numbers seven days from now and tell me how good you are at it. But seriously, historically, the three-day accuracy on temperature is about two degrees. On precipitation, we can predict about 80 percent of the time that it’s going to rain.”
Glen, who said he might have become a meteorologist if it hadn’t meant he would have to leave his hometown, admits that the adrenaline rush he gets from an approaching storm has waned a bit as he’s gotten older – especially if it’s a snow storm that’s coming- because the older you get the more you see a tornado or hail storm as something that will cost you money rather than as an exciting change of pace from the day-to-day weather. His emergency management duties also add a little more stress when there’s a storm.
“Weather used to be a lot more exciting. It’s more stressful now,” he said. “When I was on vacation in Branson and there was a storm there, it was so relaxing to just listen to it and not worry about it.” he said.
As the winter storm season approaches and then the spring storm season follows it, you can be sure that Glen will be watching and ready to share his predictions for Grundy County. It’s likely you’ll hear his name on Kansas City television broadcasts as he supplies weather information from this area – especially if there’s a “good” storm.
“Weather is always a good story,” he said. “Especially bad weather.”