The kids would call him “old school.” You and I would use the term “old fashioned.” For the residents of New Orleans and the northern Gulf Coast, he was a revered, legendary voice of calm when a hurricane was threatening the region. His name was Nash Roberts and he died last week at the age of 92. For more than 50 years, television viewers in the New Orleans area relied on him for their daily weather forecasts, updates on severe weather and, most importantly, the track of tropical systems. When a hurricane was moving towards New Orleans residents of the region had one question: What’s Nash say? While viewers respected the other television meteorologists and the experts at the National Hurricane Center, Nash’s presentation was must-see TV for the Crescent City because of his remarkable ability to predict the track of tropical storms and hurricanes. It began in 1957 with Hurricane Audrey when Roberts accurately predicted the mighty storm’s exact landfall. It was a time before weather satellites and computer models, a time when hurricane forecasting was more art than science. Yet, Nash’s forecast was 100 percent correct. He did it again with Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1969 and, most recently, Georges in 1998. His forecast of Georges earned Nash some national notoriety because of his disagreement with the National Hurricane Center. The computer models and the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center predicted Georges would make landfall west of New Orleans but Nash saw it differently, forecasting a landfall east of the city. Using felt pens and his old fashioned bulletin board, Nash explained to viewers why the computers were wrong. A few hours later the storm moved onshore east of the city. “As long as Roberts and his Magic Markers are exclusive to WWL (a New Orleans TV station),” wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune after Georges, “Channel 4 will remain the only place to get an answer to the first hurricane related question asked by anyone who’s lived in New Orleans for any length of time: What’s Nash say?” Nash’s love affair with meteorology began in 1946, when he started a private weather service after teaching meteorology at Loyola University. His training had begun a few years earlier in the Navy. In 1951, after hearing that a television meteorologist in Chicago was making more than $80,000 a year, Nash made his TV debut in New Orleans. A few years later he became a Gulf Coast legend with his handling of Hurricane Audrey. “My method of fooling with these storms is that I lock onto them,” he told the Times-Picayune in 2006. “I lock onto them and stay with ‘em 24 hours a day, seven days a week until they are gone, and that is extremely arduous.” Nash cut back on his daily weather forecasting in the early 1990’s, only returning to the airwaves when the region was being threatened by a hurricane. And in 2001 he gave it all up for his beloved wife, Lydia who was battling cancer. He cared for her until her death in 2007. “He left the love of broadcasting to care for the love of his life,” Bob Breck, a meteorologist at a competing New Orleans TV station told the newspaper. “If there is anything people should remember about Nash was that he had character. People trusted him.” They trusted him, revered him and, now, will miss him.
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