Tom Skilling
American television meteorologist (born 1952)
Thomas Ethelbert Skilling III (born February 20, 1952) is a former American television meteorologist. From 1978 to his retirement in 2024, he worked as a meteorologist at WGN-TV in Chicago.
Career
Beginnings
The oldest of four children, Tom Skilling was born at Magee Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Thomas Jr. and Betty (Clarke) Skilling. His early years were spent in Westfield, New Jersey. The family moved to the Chicago suburb of Aurora, Illinois, where he attended West Aurora High School. While in high school Skilling began his career in broadcasting at age 14, working for WKKD and WKKD-FM. Skilling observed that WKKD's forecasts were inaccurate because they were for Chicago and not Aurora, so he approached WKKD and offered to forecast the weather for several days, with the condition that if his forecasts were accurate he would be hired to host his own weather program. Skilling's forecasts were accurate, and he was hired to forecast Aurora's weather three times a day. At age 18, he began working at WLXT-TV in Aurora.
Skilling attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison to study meteorology and journalism.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tom Skilling” is american television meteorologist (born 1952). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Skilling, American and television, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7817600. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1978 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Skilling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.