EAS Alumni Profile John Toohey Morales '84

When John Toohey Morales ’84 was a teenager living in Puerto Rico in the 1970s he used to go to the local hardware store to pick up copies of the hurricane tracking charts they gave away. Whenever a tropical storm formed in the Atlantic, he would tune into the NOAA weather radio and plot the storm’s latitude and longitude and log its advisory information, including minimum pressure, maximum winds, and projected heading.

In August of 1979 a tropical depression formed in the mid-Atlantic and moved west, quickly becoming better organized. On August 26 it was named Tropical Storm David. The following day it was Hurricane David. A senior in high school, Toohey Morales plotted the storm as it made its way in the general direction of Puerto Rico. Top sustained winds were 150 mph as David passed just south of Puerto Rico, raking the southern coast of the island with high winds and heavy surf.

Toohey Morales knew the island had dodged a bullet and continued to track the storm via NOAA radio. On August 31^st David, with highest sustained winds now at 175 mph, took an unexpected turn to the north and slammed into the island of Hispaniola as a Category 5 hurricane. An estimated 2,000 people died on Hispaniola from Hurricane David.

“It was deeply tragic,” Toohey Morales says. “And at the same time, it was the clincher in terms of helping me decide what I wanted to pursue as a career.” Toohey Morales told his mom he would like to study meteorology and instead of trying to talk him out of it, she suggested he go to the National Weather Service office in San Juan and talk with the chief meteorologist.

Toohey Morales did, and there was no looking back from there.

“That meteorologist told me that if I went to college and studied meteorology, I could probably have a good career—might even get to work for the National Weather Service myself,” Toohey Morales said. The high school Toohey Morales attended was small, with a graduating class of 67 people in 1980. The guidance counselor did not have any experience with students wanting to study meteorology, so Toohey Morales grabbed the thick Barron’s Guide to Colleges and went school by school, seeing which ones offered meteorology as an undergraduate major.

Cornell was on his short list and he applied. He was accepted by Cornell and several other schools and when his mother saw the options, she told him, “You've been accepted to Cornell, John. There is no way you're not going to go to Cornell.”

While earning his degree, Toohey Morales worked at the college radio station, WVBR, and to this day says that experience was incredibly valuable in shaping his future. “My first language was English as a young child, but then when my mom and I moved to Puerto Rico I became fluent in Spanish and developed a bit of an accent in English,” Toohey said. “Being on-air at VBR helped improve my English and opened my mind to the eventual possibility of a career in broadcasting.”

After graduating with a B.S. in atmospheric science, Toohey Morales went back to Puerto Rico and started a job as a meteorological technician with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in San Juan. In his seven years with NOAA he held several positions, including lead forecaster in San Juan. In 1989 Hurricane Hugo hit Puerto Rico and Toohey Morales became the de facto spokesperson for the National Weather Service office. It was a position that tapped into many of his strengths: he was bilingual; he was a trained meteorologist, and he had broadcast experience.

Someone from Telemundo saw him on-air and invited Toohey Morales to lunch to talk about the possibility of joining the local t.v. news team in San Juan. It did not work out, but this conversation planted the idea in his head and months later when Toohey Morales saw an opening at Univision Miami, he applied. And he got the job!

That was 1991. John Toohey Morales has been on television sets in the Miami area ever since—first delivering daily weather segments and severe weather coverage for local news and then as

Hurricane Specialist for NBC 6 South Florida. He is a trusted face and voice to millions of Floridians. Toohey Morales is now also a columnist for the Bureau of Atomic Scientists, a contract weather forecaster, and founder and president of ClimaData Corporation, which provides expert consulting and forensic meteorological research as well as tailored weather forecasts to government, industrial, and media clients throughout the U.S., Caribbean and Latin America.

He has also become outspoken in his efforts to educate and inform citizens, scientists, and policymakers about the effects of human-caused climate change.

In September of this year Toohey Morales received one of the biggest honors of his professional career. He was elected an honorary member of the American Meteorological Society, which is the highest honor the AMS confers. In the 104-year existence of the group, only 138 people have achieved this status.

Forty years after coming to Ithaca, Toohey Morales is still grateful for the opportunities Cornell gave him. His mother was a single parent raising him while working in retail and Cornell provided a generous financial aid package that made it possible for him to attend. “I basically chose Cornell out of a phonebook-sized guide of colleges,” Toohey Morales said, “and it has turned out so well. Cornell made many things possible for me and it feels important to give something back.”

Most recently, Toohey Morales was elected for a four-year term to the Cornell University Board of Trustees by his fellow alumni. He is also on the CALS Advisory Council and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability’s Advisory Council. He has been active in alumni groups in various roles since 1992. While running for the elected Alumni Trustee position on the Board, Toohey Morales reflected on what Cornell has meant to him and why he stays involved:

“Becoming a Cornellian led to a series of personal choices and a career track that collectively had a ripple effect across my community and beyond. It’s a Cornell story repeated thousands of times, each bearing fruit in the form of a positive societal impact—the greatest good.”