Sunny and Mild: Getting to Know Our Fair-Weather Friends of Local News

During her tour of duty in Miami, Loresca covered four hurricane seasons, including the one that brought Hurricane Katrina. It was thrilling, she says, having come from the West Coast and never experiencing such torrential winds before, with waves crashing against the seawall and hitting everyone from the hip up. Her station was on the bay and she reported those storms from outside, a cameraman holding her down and a cord lashed around her waist so she wouldn’t get blown away. Glamour went out the window with Hurricane Wilma.

Loresca’s personal weather tastes are more conservative. She prefers a languorous June gloom — morning fog with clouds that start to strip away by afternoon to a slow reveal of hazy sun.

Kevin Scanlon

When it Raines . . .

Kevin Scanlon

Head turner: Elita Loresca

Related Content

• Five People Making L.A. a Better Place
  May 17, 2013
• 20: Lamb Dip at Philippe the Original
  November 7, 2012
• Charity Comedy Night
  July 12, 2012
• Silicon Beach: 5 People Making L.A. a New Tech Industry Capital
  May 23, 2012
• 10 People Making L.A. a Better Place
  May 22, 2012

More About

• Fritz Coleman
• Mark Thompson
• Elita Loresca
• Weather
• Sciences

Her personal lifestyle choices are more conservative as well. When the party kids are stumbling out of bars, she is waking up at her usual 1:45 a.m. She was at work today by 2:45 a.m., when she read the National Weather Service report, checked to see if the highs and lows she gave the day before were accurate, checked how they compared historically and if any cities would be breaking temperature records. She was in makeup by 4 a.m., had taped her first weathercast by 4:45, a “gas-cast” for the Shell gas-station pumps, and at 4:58 a.m., she went live on Today in L.A.

In her opinion, people seem to notice more how she does the weather, not how she looks. “I’ve never been a showy-showy-showy person,” she says. “If I come off being a little rrarrr!” — she shoots a naughty, hypersexual look — “it’s one thing. But if I come off like the girl next door, I think that makes more of an impression. I like to give it to you nice and basic. I don’t try to confuse you by using big words that I would never use with my 3-year-old nephew. Doing the weather is like a soap opera. If viewers love you, they’re gonna keep you around. They’re not gonna kill you off.” It’s safe to say that her viewers, who range in age from 2 years old to 100, would tune in to watch her read a grocery list.

Yet at the family baby shower she went to this weekend, the prevailing comment was, “Oh my gosh, you look so skinny in person. On TV you are so taba,” which means “fat” in Tagalog.

“I was blessed with a full moon,” she countered with a happy sigh. “A little round face. You have to love what the Lord gave you. If I look 10 pounds heavier on television than I do in person, so be it.”

“But why you diet?” said the aunts, imploring her, in that Filipino way of saying hello, to eat, eat.

“Thank you,” said Loresca, yielding to yet another photo with the relatives, who love to take pictures. “But I can only have one fried chicken, not 10.”

Keeping It Real: Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson’s first audition as a weathercaster happened a long time ago, on a boat in a marina with a surprised lady who opened up a can of whoop ass on him because she couldn’t figure out why he was on her boat. He was a young buck then and had never been on camera, and on top of that, the station had neglected to secure her permission. But he went with the flow and ad-libbed some funny stuff.

Ad-libbing funny stuff is a running theme in Thompson’s weather career. There was the Memorial Day he predicted it would be sunny. It rained, and he felt so bad about it he asked an old lady to punch him in the arm on camera for the entire broadcast. (She did.)

People on the street used to casually ask him how come it’s always so warm in the Valley and so cool at the coast? “Well, the topography of California is such that the warmer air is locked into the Valley locations, whereas the sea breeze and marine influences are limited to the coastal strip, depending on the pressure changes, you know, inland and offshore, which is what drives those wind velocities, and that’s a dynamic that’s ultimately going to influence whether or not that sea breeze makes it into the inland valleys,” he’d answer, before he realized that asking about the weather was really people’s way of saying “hi.”

They’d stare at him for a bit. “Dude,” they’d say, “I don’t want to ask you anything ever again.”

Thompson is not the swashbuckling storm-chasing weather guy, or the cerebral scientific weather guy (though he has a background in philosophy and biology and is plenty smart). He’s the everyday Joe of the weather trade, the guy you’re happy you sat next to at a sports bar, who happens to know a thing or two about monsoons. There are weather guys, he says, like one of his friends at the Weather Channel, who love to be out in hurricanes. “You’ll see him buttoned up in hat and gear, and he’ll be out there. That to me isn’t ‘doing the weather’ anymore. You’re not a weather guy, you’re a reporter. That’s what reporters do. You’re out there giving a sense of the moment. It’s a different job. Weather guys tend to be very one-dimensional in terms of the science,” he says in the deep, beefy radio voice discerning viewers may recognize from American Idol or When Good Pets Go Bad.