DeKALB | In a sixth-floor cubicle office of white peg-board walls overlooking the East Lagoon, Gilbert Sebenste watches the weather change. He turns from his staff meteorologist duty to answer the phone.

“Visibility should be reasonably good,” he says to the caller. “6:15?”

He turns to the nearest of a half-dozen screens and clicks another program, telling the University Police officer on the phone that yes, landing a helicopter around dusk will be safe, even in the light rain.

The call is a common one. Sebenste, an NIU alumnus, answers questions so frequently from his Davis Hall office that his on-call voice resembles a radio disc jockey. Whether the caller is from the Physical Plant, the football team on the road or faculty flying to Russia, he has a forecast, prepared every morning. He has kept NIU ready for the worst since his first week eight years ago.

On the first day of classes in 1998, students filled hallways with the sound of socializing, but the sirens were silent about the storm approaching at 90 mph. Six students suffered severe injuries that day.

“It hurt a lot of people in the [King Memorial] Commons,” said Rob Vest Jr., director of environmental health and safety. Vest watched Sebenste’s academic performance at NIU and career afterward with avid interest, claiming he knew weather the way a mechanic knows his car. With Sebenste in mind, Vest suggested year after year that NIU hire someone to handle severe weather notification, and the 1998 storm finally drove the point home.

“The next day I was hired on,” Sebenste said. His position was somewhat experimental; Vest said none of the colleges in the nation had ever created such a position before, and so Sebenste’s role became defined by his projects. He soon developed NIU into the first school to be named “adequately prepared” by the National Weather Service. He helped NIU and DeKalb become a StormReady community in 2002, and transformed NIU into the prototype for schools across the nation, with a network of over 170 radios.

Sebenste also maintains the servers, equipment, computers and NIU Channel 26. When not busy with weather, he helps the Heating Plant determine gas costs for winter based on expected temperatures.

“He’s saved the university thousands of dollars,” Vest said. “Thousands.”

More recently, Sebenste has developed a process to notify the school of emergencies. Three times a year, he delivers speeches to the UP, where every detective, dispatcher and sworn officer is now trained in the basics of bad weather.

“If the sky looks really nasty, we call Gilbert,” said UP Lt. Matt Kiederlen. Kiederlen has known Sebenste professionally for five years, and said he trusts Sebenste more than any TV weather man in planning possible evacuations.

For Sebenste, storms have been more exciting than fear-inducing. He remembers attending a picnic in Indiana around age four, with hot, humid air creating a breeding ground for storms, and he and his father took a helicopter tour.

“Once we got above the people, you could see this huge, monstrous cloud,” he said. The severe thunderstorm approached the picnic minutes later, bending trees and ending the picnic bingo game.

“All the chips blew away,” Sebenste said. “Some of the prizes blew away, too.” The clouds burst into heavy rain, flooding a nearby playpen.

“All the kids were screaming and crying,” Sebenste said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool!'” He remembers running through mud to the family car, and when the gopher hole halfway across the field caught his father’s foot, he learned dirty words for the first time. The cursing continued at home: the TV weatherman predicted a 20 percent chance of rain, and his father asked why forecasters can’t get it right.

From then on, Sebenste knew his future. He began reading weather books, making his first forecast a year later. Although often wrong then, he kept at it, eventually learning how to predict often chaotic conditions with accuracy.

Today he is ready for whatever Mother Nature sends.

“Things are changing so fast,” Sebenste said. “Best thing I can do is keep up with it.”