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

A sign on Harry Truman's White House desk proclaimed, "The buck stops here."

Well, if there's a weather equivalent of a buck, it stops at the desk of weatherman, Louis Uccellini. That's according to Commentator, David Laskin.

"As director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Uccellini oversees the vast network of people and supercomputers responsible for predicting the weather of half a continent. "I don't jump in and do a forecast," he says, "but when there's a potentially dangerous situation I will raise questions with the forecasters and, if necessary, challenge them."

For a man with such a big job, Uccellini is remarkably modest. And human. Somehow it's reassuring that the nation's leading weatherman has loved snow all his life and co-authored a classic history of East Coast snowstorms. Uccellini reads Robert Frost's wintry verse and still loses sleep over a really good snow event. He even has his own personal perfect storm - the East Coast blizzard of January 1996, which NCEP nailed.

What Uccellini loves best about his job is the challenge of extending the forecast lead time, especially for extreme weather. As he puts it: "Thirty years ago, we didn't even pay attention to the 3-to-7 day progs, but this has changed dramatically. It's going to be exciting to work on 3 to 14 day forecasts over the next 10 years - to achieve a level of confidence and credibility so that people will take action."