When you watch the weather at night, you only see us television meteorologists for a few minutes each newscast, but what you see is just the final product of a long day spent in preparation.

"Well, I first of all get up at 1:30, two o'clock in the morning, prepare the forecast," says NewsChannel 7 Daybreak and Noon meteorologist Chad Franzen.

Although we don’t all have to get up that early, our work begins at least four hours before a newscast, and we stay pretty busy right up until show time, and even afterwards.

We meteorologists have degrees in our field, so when you see us present the forecast, that's one we've actually made ourselves, and we all usually spend at least a couple of hours a day forecasting for northern and central Wisconsin.

Even after we’ve completed a forecast, we keep a close eye on the sky.

"You always have to be willing to check for updated information which might have an impact on changing the forecast throughout the time that you're here,” says Chief Meteorologist Mike Breunling. “Sometimes forecast conditions don’t change very much during the given day, but sometimes, they can change rather frequently and you really have to make sure that you’re checking for updates to be sure that your forecasts are as clean and fresh as they should be.”

The rest of our time is spent making the forecast available to you... on the Internet for wsaw.com, in newspapers, on our 24/7 Weather channel, and, of course, on NewsChannel 7.

That involves preparing computer graphics for our various weather presentations and typing our forecasts into several different software programs.

It may surprise you to know that when we’re on the air, we don't use a teleprompter, so we have to really know what we're going to talk about so that we can deliver our presentations spontaneously without leaving out any important details.

But our duties don't end with forecasting and reporting.

We meteorologists at NewsChannel 7 are also cooperative observers for the National Weather Service.

That means that every 12 hours, and sometimes every six hours, we venture outdoors and measure how much precipitation has fallen, and we measure the snow depth (if there’s snow on the ground).

Although official daily rainfall totals for Wausau come from the Wausau Downtown Airport, if it snows, the snowfall measurement taken at NewsChannel 7 is the official daily snowfall total for Wausau.

When dangerous or threatening weather comes around, life gets even more exciting in the weather lab.

“If weather advisories, warnings, or watches are issued [by the National Weather Service], you have to be able to get that information on-air and bring it to the people, to the general public and to the viewers as quickly as you can,” says Breunling. “Then set up a schedule to review those warnings, make sure that they’re updated, and again, bring them to the public in an updated and concise, timely, situation.”

That involves running crawls that you see at the bottom of your TV screen; putting the warnings on the Web; and perhaps even interrupting programming on 24/7 Weather and on NewsChannel 7.

Depending upon the severity of the weather event, there is usually lots of new information streaming in to the weather lab from the National Weather Service; such as damage reports, snowfall or rainfall totals, and reports of large hail, tornadoes, sleet, or other weather phenomena.

Any of those things that are pertinent to the general public, for safety or public interest reasons must be kept track of and reported as well.

So we don't ever get bored here in the weather lab - it's a lot of work, but we like it, and we work hard to keep you safe and informed.