Tom Skilling, WGN-TV’s chief meteorologist, will host the 33rd Annual Tornado and Severe Weather Seminar at the Fermilab National Accelerator complex in Batavia, on Saturday, April 6 starting at noon.  

The seminar will repeat in its entirety at 6 p.m.  Attendees are advised to arrive early, as admission is free and the seminars fill up quickly.

Those on Twitter can follow hashtag #SkillingFermi for special giveaways, information, and nuggets from the seminar itself.  WGN-TV will stream the entire seminar starting at noon CT on WGNtv.com.  On April 13, 2013 at 8 p.m. CT and April 14, 2013 at 2 p.m. CT, a two-hour summary of Skilling’s Fermilab will be featured on CLTV.

Tom Skilling’s Annual Tornado and Severe Weather Seminar was created to educate viewers about the dynamics and after-effects of severe weather, and is open to everyone including students from junior high age and older.  

Skilling created this seminar 32 years ago, along with Brian Smith, currently with the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Omaha, Nebraska.  For more information about this seminar, go to WGNtv.com/fermilab.  The 2013 Fermilab seminar will include the following weather topics:

 • Newly appointed Director of the National Weather Service, Dr. Louis Uccellini, will talk about Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the East Coast, and the incredibly accurate predictions of that storm.

• Dr. Russ Schneider, The Director of the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center at Norman, OK.  The Storm Prediction Center issues ALL of the country’s severe weather watches—including our tornado watches.

• Dr. Don Wuebbles from the University of Illinois will discuss the correlation between climate change and severe weather.  He is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and played a huge role in Montreal Protocol, which led to the banning of chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol spray cans.

• Ed Fenelon, head of the National Weather Service’s Chicago Forecast Office, and Warning Coordination Meteorologist Jim Allsopp will talk about the 50th anniversary of a devastating tornado which smashed into Kankakee a half-century ago.  

It produced one of the longest tornado tracks of any tornado in the Chicago area.