It was late summer in the early ’70s, and 4-year-old Gilbert Sebenste knew the conditions were right for disaster. He was on the helicopter ride at Sauzer’s Kiddieland in northwest Indiana when he saw a massive cloud in the distance. The temperatures were in the triple digits.

“I ran back to my parents and said, ‘Mommy, Daddy, it’s gonna be a bad storm,'” Sebenste recalled.

He was right. A few minutes later, his family was standing under a canopy as 40 to 50 mph winds blew and rain poured all around them. When they got home later that day, they turned on Channel 7. The weather forecaster said there was a 20 percent chance of storms.

“I knew it was hot and humid. I knew there was gonna be a storm. Why didn’t they know?” Sebenste said, referring to Channel 7. “I said, ‘I’m gonna do a better job than them, or at least I’m gonna try.'”

From that moment on, Sebenste has been hooked. At 13, he put a weather station on the roof of his parents’ house. As an undergraduate at NIU, he studied meteorology. After college, he worked as a broadcast meteorologist before being hired as NIU staff meteorologist in the late ’90s.

“My main concern is keeping the faculty, students and staff safe from bad weather and alerting them when bad weather’s on the way,” Sebenste said.

The Calumet City native is one of the hundreds of staff members who, on a daily basis, make NIU operate. But what Sebenste does is rare as only a handful of universities have a staff meteorologist.

From literally the time he wakes up in the morning until the time he goes to sleep, which is usually the next morning, he’s monitoring the weather. He knows what his forecast is going to be before he even arrives on campus. He has other interests and duties — he’s a systems administrator, deacon at his church and works out when he has time — but weather is numero uno in Gilbert’s world.

“Weather and him are like Tom Skilling. His life is wrapped up in the weather,” said geography professor David Changnon who taught Sebenste as an undergraduate.

On Friday in his sixth floor Davis Hall office — where a sign on the door reads “Welcome to NIU Weather!” — Sebenste put out his forecasts and monitored the situation in the southern United States, which was getting hit by tornadoes and thunderstorms. Sebenste, who is 40 but could pass for a decade younger, wears glasses and has short gray-streaked brown hair. Although he typed furiously, he said he would be much busier if it was northern Illinois getting hit by severe weather rather than the South.

“A large part of what he does is mitigation. He’s mitigating against some disastrous weather events,” said assistant geography professor Walker Ashley, who has chased storms with Sebenste. “Gilbert – he’s the meteorologist to the extreme.”