Hampton becomes Bowling Green Weatherman

Mon, 10/26/2015 - 3:25pm — Sam Osborne

Butler County native Landon Hampton begins work today as Chief Meteorologist at WNKY, the NBC and CBS affiliate for Bowling Green owned by Max Media. “They have built an entirely new set and hired seven new on air talents,” stated Hampton in a recent interview. “I was part of that hiring. Monday, October 26 we launch a brand new show called SoKY sunrise that will be taking place from 6-7 AM every weekday morning.”
Hampton began working with the company earlier this year. “I was brought on as a guest host for the Bowling Green Today show for WNKY about 4 weeks ago,” said Hampton. “They needed someone to fill and were picking out some known people in the community to come in and have some fun, just interview and play host. Very soon after that I was called in by the Executive Producer and General Manager and asked if I would be interested in a role there. After they laid out what was going on with the new hires and I was able to see the molds and the models for the new weather studio that was being built, it was really hard to say no.”
“It is exciting to be a part of something new,” continued Hampton. “For a long time, it has just been WBKO around here. I believe people have been craving something different, especially the younger generation. I think we will be geared towards that and will provide a breath of fresh air.”
Hampton was born in Butler County and lived there until leaving to attend college at WKU.

“I majored in meteorology at Western Kentucky University,” stated Hampton. “The program didn’t get accredited until my Sophomore year. I was planning to head west to Des Plaines, Oklahoma or Kansas – somewhere that I could major in what I wanted follow - my passion, which of course was the weather.”
“The winter break of my sophomore year I was informed by my advisor that the Board of Regents had accredited the program and were hiring four new professors. The rest was history. I worked for UPS the entire time I was in school loading trailers at the Bowling Green local sort. Right after I graduated I was granted a peak assignment and I was actually a flight control meteorologist for UPS in Louisville.”
“The family history I have - between my mother, my brother and my father, they were all entrepreneurs – I always envisioned that dream of owning my own weather company. Whenever I left UPS in 2011 I was brought on with Beech Tree News. I started Beech Tree weather, which was a weather blog. I also produced the radio weather [sound] bites for WLBQ after they purchased that station. That program grew and exploded. I took a similar model and I created WXornot. WX is the national abbreviation for weather. My company is Weather or not. Long story short, that exploded here in the Bowling Green market. I was picked up with the Daily News doing all their online weather reporting and doing some weather with D93 from time to time. I started with that January of this year.”
“It has really been history since then with the exposure that the Daily News helped provide me along with social media and the weather website. It just kind of blew up. Over the past four or five months it has really taken off. Of course, we exploded with the two huge snows we had. Any weather person will tell you: no weather is not good for ratings, but when there is weather going on you own the ratings. Everyone wants to know what is going on. I like to tell people – whether you love the weather or hate the weather, you have to pay attention because it impacts you every day. That is the bottom line. Everyone wants to know, especially in the morning – what is the weather going to be today?”
Hampton has distinguished himself in the past by putting his efforts behind the development of a new program in Butler County, the Kentucky Mesonet. The Mesonet is a network of automated stations that take weather measurements throughout Kentucky being developed by the Kentucky Climate Center at WKU.
“The Mesonet is a very unique state of the art weather and climate system,” stated Hampton. “It measures wind speeds on a large tower which has an anemometer on top. There is a point and tip rain gauge - a high end rain gauge that works perfectly. It measures solar radiation, it measures humidity. Butler County will be one of only five or six sites across the state to implement soil probes to measure water fraction vapor in soil. Basically, this gives farmers a much clearer idea of when they need to spray or harvest. ”
“From a forecasting standpoint, there is never enough data. The more data we have, the better we will be at forecasting. Not only from a real time but from a climatic standpoint all of that data will be logged for eternity after it is up and working. That is something nice to have: for example, [logged information can be used] to compare past flooding events. If we have a flood event come though, we can look at similar behaviors in the future and say “This is acting similar, we probably need to put a warning out for this area and let them know what is coming this way.””
Located by 403 near Woodbury, the Butler County site is expected to begin producing data this year.
“[Butler County Extension Agent] Greg Drake and I spearheaded that: I worked closely with WKU,” stated Hampton of the Mesonet project in Butler County. “It is being implemented in Butler County on a piece of land Sam Moore donated for us to have. Greg Drake and I had several meetings with people in the agriculture community along with community leaders, talking about a need for one of these.”
“There is a hole in the Mesonet in Edmonson and Butler County and we want to get ours up and going. We took initiative with that and this will be the first Mesonet station implemented by the Kentucky Mesonet program that will be completely independently funded by the people in that county, which is something huge. Mesonet has been working on this model to get more stations up and running, but they need community support to come together and do this. Whenever it first started, they had a large grant and were able to start the process with that. Once that money was gone, there were no further monies to implement new stations. They had never gotten a commitment from Butler County, but now they do. The foundation has already been laid – that is phase one. Phase two and three should be up any time. The first site is located near Woodbury. In the future, what I would love to see is more sites in Rochester, Quality, close to Morgantown and just south of Caneyville if I had my way.”