Neil Laverne Frank (born September 11, 1931) is an American meteorologist and the former director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in University Park, Florida. He was instrumental in advancing both the scientific and informational aspects of hurricane forecasting. He retired in 2008 as chief meteorologist at KHOU in Houston. He is the grandfather of American singer Forrest Frank, best known as one half of the pop duo Surfaces and his solo career as a CCM performer.[4][5][6][7][8]
Frank served in the United States Air Force where he received training as a weather officer before being a graduate metereology student. In 1961, he began working as a forecaster for the NHC. He was appointed director of the center in 1974. While director, he also served as chairman of the International Hurricane Committee, which coordinates hurricane warnings across North America. He participated in meteorological experiments conducted off the coast of Africa. In 1987, Frank was called to testify as an expert witness before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. As of 2018[update] he is the longest serving director of the NHC.
As NHC director, Frank was in the news frequently and appeared in many interviews with CBS news anchor Dan Rather,[9] whose early career included coverage of several hurricanes.[10]
During Hurricane Allen in 1980, Frank used an amateur radio station to communicate directly with the Brownsville Weather Center in Brownsville, Texas after it lost all of its conventional communications links. The only remaining communications link between the Hurricane Center and Brownsville was the amateur radio station running on battery power. NHC and Brownsville discussed the strange behavior of the eye of Hurricane Allen while it stalled just off the Texas coast for nearly two hours.[11]
Broadcasting career
In June 1987, Frank retired from the National Hurricane Center and joined Houston's CBS affiliate, KHOU.[12] He was well known to the Houston market from his reports as director of the National Hurricane Center, particularly from his work during Hurricane Alicia, which made landfall near Houston in 1983. Frank was the chief meteorologist for the television station for over 20 years receiving numerous awards. In December 2007, he announced that he would retire from broadcasting at KHOU-TV in 2008 and on May 19, 2008, Frank announced on the 10 pm broadcast that he was retiring at the end of May.[13] He continued to provide the station with coverage of special weather projects and hurricanes.
↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 25 May 2011. Retrieved 7 July 2007.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
↑ An Evangelical Declaration on Global WarmingArchived 2013-04-25 at the Wayback Machine "We believe Earth and its ecosystems – created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory."
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
