The Rain Man

Paul Douglas is not the area’s most experienced broadcast meteorologist, nor its  longest-tenured. He’s not a local boy, and at one point, he left loyal fans high and dry for the bright lights of a bigger market. His chastened return to the airwaves a few years later was anticlimactic, and we wondered if the weather guy who embodied our fascination with the climate had worn out his welcome.

Not long after that, however, Star Tribune columnist C. J. was once more painstakingly chronicling the evolution of his hair (A “series” of transplants since 1987—“it’s finally getting where I want it to be,” he says), and Paul Douglas was again working his way into the center of our weather universe.

It was inevitable. Douglas is simply the most intriguing public chronicler of the unending drama that is our local climate. Perhaps it’s the entrepreneurial streak, perhaps it’s the florid vocabulary, perhaps the odd amalgam of nerd and showman—perhaps it is the hair.

Whatever. It’s clear that Douglas is back on top. Many have forgotten he ever left. Think local broadcast weather and his face inevitably pops into your head. He’s smart, passionate about his craft, sincere, and none too slick. Run into him at Eden Prairie Center, and he’s not too high-falutin’ to stop and talk a little shop and look at a picture of the grandkids. He might just barely remember you from that sweaty day at the state fair.

Douglas Paul Kruhoeffer, forty-five, has arguably found a home in Minnesota so conducive because he lives, sleeps, and breathes weather. And though we’re all decades off the farm, in our climate-controlled homes and vehicles, the snowplowing service ready to clear our driveway—so do we.

“It’s a dirty science,” Douglas says of his unmasterable passion. “The atmosphere is still largely misunderstood because every day is a new and distinct creation. It’s the ultimate manifestation of chaos theory.”

As if mastering the weather doesn’t keep him busy enough, Douglas always seems to need to find something more to do—more than being a husband to his wife, Laurie Kruhoeffer, an architect; father to two teenage sons; and chief meteorologist at WCCO–TV. He’s also founder, chair, and chief cheerleader at his Minnetonka startup Digital Cyclone, which sells customized, localized forecasts across North America.

“Making a success of a company is the ultimate challenge,” he insists—this from a guy who has attempted to forecast the weather for nearly thirty years. You gotta give him credit for ambition.

“A lot of people in the forecasting business, I’ve found were traumatized by weather, and they could either let themselves be terrified or learn enough to overcome it,” reveals Douglas, whose own boyhood home in Columbia, Pennsylvania, was flooded by hurricane Agnes in 1972 when he was fourteen years old.

So it followed that in 1975, during his senior year in high school, Douglas, working at McDonald’s but fascinated with the weather, began providing forecasts to the local 500-watt radio station, WHEX. The station’s general manager, deeming “Kruhoeffer” unpronounceable, told him it “had to go.”

At Penn State, between classes, young Kruhoeffer, known as Paul Douglas on the air, began feeding forecasts to a network of stations, often working from a closet so as not to disturb his roommates. One of his clients, WNEP–TV in Wilkes-Barre–Scranton, called him in desperation one weekend. A scheduling mix-up left both its weathermen out of town. Douglas came to the rescue. I “was awful,” Douglas says, “but not so awful that they didn’t hire me to do weekend weather.”

After he graduated with a bachelor of science in meteorology, it was on to Stamford, Connecticut, and cable pioneer Satellite News Channel, where he worked with legendary Twin Cities weather showman Barry ZeVan. “Barry had a signature style, like many of the successful guys at the time,” Douglas recalls. “He urged me to go to Minnesota. He said, ‘You’ll love it, and they’ll love you.’ ”

In the Twin Cities, WTCN, which would morph briefly into WUSA and then KARE–11, had just been sold to Gannett. Douglas arrived in 1983 to head up weather at the station. He would stay eleven years and become an essential component of the juggernaut led by Paul Magers and Diana Pierce, which took the station from a distant third place to the undisputed market leader.

The Twin Cities was, in 1983, already home to several broadcast meteorologists. KSTP was leading the way and had begun to invest heavily in forecasting technology. By contrast, Douglas relied on an impish sense of humor, KARE’s outdoor weather studio, and a penchant for descriptive language well outside the bounds of traditional forecasting. His helicoptered narration of the 1986 Fridley tornado only added to the gonzo mystique.

“I think you can have sound science and be entertaining,” he insists. “I grew up watching a guy, Jim O’Brien, in Philadelphia. He had a flair for words. He was colorful, descriptive. He turned it into an event without cheapening it. It’s storytelling.”

Some would go so far as to say Douglas is a student of the medium. “Doug understands TV quite well,” adds his friend and former colleague, KARE’s Paul Magers. “He’s not making it up as he goes along.”

By the early 1990s, Douglas was flying high atop the local market but was frustrated at the lack of tools to translate what was going on in the atmosphere to viewers. Visual presentation of weather forecasts had remained static for decades. “I dreamt about finding a way to display the weather in a 3-D format, but I had no idea how to translate that to technology,” Douglas recalls. “Luckily, I’ve been blessed by friends who can take my dreams and visions to a business model.”

Beginning in 1989, each night after the 6 p.m. broadcast, Douglas would leave KARE and head to Burger King to pick up dinner, then drive to the home of then-business partner, Craig Burfeind, a software developer. Burfeind, using a Silicon Graphics computer, created EarthWatch in his bedroom.