Four things to know about GBH's new meteorologist Dave Epstein

Dave Epstein officially joined GBH News this week through a new partnership that will have him bring weather forecasts to Morning Edition every weekday, as well as weekly discussions about big weather topics like climate change. The Massachusetts-based meteorologist is an author, a college instructor and a member of the American Meteorological Society. Plus he’s an avid horticulturist — or, how he’d rather put it, he likes plants. He founded GrowingWisdom.com, a video blog for home gardeners. Here are four things to know about him.

1. Epstein has deep New England roots.

Epstein lives in South Natick, Mass., grew up in Portland, Maine and attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He interned at the local CBS affiliate in Portland in high school, where he discovered his love of weather.

“That was the first time I really I started thinking: ‘This is what I want to do for a career,’” he told GBH Morning Edition hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel. He continues to work with the Boston Globe and WBZ-TV, and now teaches meteorology at Colby College and Framingham State University.

2. His favorite season is spring.

When Morning Edition host Jeremy Siegel asked what his favorite season is, Epstein said, surprisingly, it’s not summer — he enjoys mid-March to Mid-May most.

“I know that folks sometimes don’t like March,” he said. “But here’s the thing about even late February: the light for me is changing so rapidly at that point, we’re gaining so much light. There [are] signals in nature, the last couple of weeks in February, the birds are starting to mate so they’re chirping differently. ... I think spring is kind of magical.”

Summer is his least-favorite season, especially as a gardener. “It’s all green — I’m weeding, I’ve got to deal with watering and keeping things alive,” he said. “And it’s just for me, as a gardener, it’s kind of a stressful season. Yes, I get my tomatoes and I’m harvesting, but I’m really an early spring to early summer kind of guy.”

3. He loves snowstorms.

Epstein shared, as a New Englander, that his favorite weather event is a snowstorm. He recalled a winter in the ’70s in Portland when the city had 141 inches of snow throughout the season. “I think as a little kid, I remember just being in complete awe of the fact the snow was bigger than me,” he said. “And so I think that that kind of made me just wonder, why was this happening? Why was my world turning completely white? Why was my dad having to shovel in order for me to walk?”

He also loves backdoor fronts, like last week when the temperature rapidly dropped from mid-80s to mid-60s. “I think that's kind of neat that the weather can change 20 degrees in 10 minutes,” he said.

4. He loves the meteorology community in Boston.

Epstein says that he values his colleagues in the city who are dedicated to providing viewers with accurate forecasts. “I'm really humbled to be in a community in Boston where we have some of the best forecasters around,” he said. “The people I work with in general, even if they're competitors, we're all just — I love how committed we are to this forecasting.”

He said that his approach to forecasting is to reassure as many people as possible that weather doesn’t have to be scary. “One of the things that I try to do is think about what's going to happen to the majority of people,” Epstein said. “For the majority of us, we just kind of get through weather and we enjoy great weather like today and we sort of just manage through bad weather.”