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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

It's really no secret that hurricanes are a natural for the media. They play out over a few days' time, and each one has a name that provides continuity and personality.

The people who cover hurricanes can also become stars in their own right. Back in the thirties, a forecaster named Grady Norton started using radio to deliver hurricane warnings for the U.S. Weather Bureau. Norton became a legend across Florida, where he appeared on several dozen radio stations each time a hurricane drew near. Norton died on the job in 1954 while covering Hurricane Hazel.

That same year, a legend in TV news —Edward R. Murrow— became the first storm chaser on television. Murrow took a film crew into Hurricane Edna, flying aboard one of the hurricane-hunter aircraft that was still a novelty at the time. A few days later, after Edna plowed across New England, viewers got to see the footage from Murrow's flight.

Another soon-to-be-famous newsman was a local reporter in Houston when Hurricane Carla approached the Texas coast in 1960. Dan Rather spent 70 hours at the Galveston weather office covering Carla for KHOU-TV. A few months later, Rather became a national correspondent for CBS, and the rest is history. Today, the chief meteorologist at KHOU has a hurricane connection of his own. Before he started doing TV in Houston, Neil Frank was head of the National Hurricane Center in the 1980s. He started the tradition of live satellite feeds to update stations around the country on the biggest and baddest hurricanes.

Thanks today to writer Bob Henson, who watches hurricanes on TV in Boulder, Colorado. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by Subaru. Check us out on the web at mountwashington.org.