If Brant Beckman forecasted his journey to meteorology, it would likely include torrential downpours, large hail, and damaging winds – severe weather for a life just as turbulent.

 

Even as Brant sits in the NewsCenter1 studio, he is in awe that he is a weather scientist, let alone the station’s newest chief meteorologist.

 

“I’ve never seen myself as a meteorologist, even today,” he said. “I never thought I was smart enough to do it. I just liked watching other people who did it, and I just assumed it would be something someone else would do.”

 

While Brant doubted his ability to be a meteorologist, he never doubted his passion for weather. “At 8, 9, 10 years old, I would watch the weather channel for fun.” Brant was born in Waterloo, Iowa, but spent most of his childhood living out of a suitcase traveling from Los Angeles to St. Louis to Chicago.

 

Living in chaos made Brant feel at home with chaotic events like thunderstorms, hurricanes, and blizzards.

 

“I had a pretty back and forth childhood, so weather was this great escape for me – reassurance that the natural world was still there for me.”

 

Brant’s parents divorced when he was four, so the young weather-lover would split his time between Los Angeles and Chicago. With little weather in LA outside of hot winds and wildfires, Brant would get excited when visiting his dad in Chicago. “I would fly out there, and it was like traveling to this mystical land where there were actually thunderstorms and other interesting things happening.”

 

Every morning, Brant would get a brief weather update from his grandfather, a Chicago firefighter and construction business owner, and then tune into the Windy City’s daily weather report. “I wanted to see storms. I wanted to see something cool. I always felt comfort in the weather – anticipating the moments; the idea of what it is going to do; how it is going to interrupt things; how it is going to change things; how it is going to reveal itself to people.”

 

 

 

His fascination with weather and the science behind it also came from his maternal grandfather. “He would always talk about weather in these grand epic terms. It was just kind of ingrained in me.”

 

A two-week road trip with his grandfather when he was 12 sparked his passion for the weather even more and gave him a quick glimpse of the place he would eventually call home. “For two weeks, we slept out of the back of a minivan and just drove West. We had no destination. We followed the Platte River going up the Oregon Trail and pulled over at every gimmicky place.”

 

At one stop, Brant’s grandfather questioned why there were so many motorcycles. The duo had stopped in Rapid City during the first week of August – the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. “We went to see buffalo and cruise through Spearfish Canyon. We were near Devil’s Tower at a campground overlooking the plains and I can’t confirm it, but we both think we saw a tornado. I just remember the clouds and storms being different here.”

 

Many years later, Brant would find himself back in the Black Hills, watching the same unique storm systems.

 

 

“My mother and grandfather were really the ones who encouraged the passion and enthusiasm for it,” Brant said. And while Brant can’t believe where his life is now, his mother can. “I still don’t believe it, but my mom said she always knew I would be doing this. She said, ‘It took you a bit, but you got there.’”

 

It took a while, and many ups and downs -- including getting kicked out of the University of Oklahoma’s meteorology program -- for Brant to realize what he was always meant to do. “I was depressed and had a lot of misgivings,” Brant said of his freshman year at the University of Oklahoma. “I walked in and there were all these people talking about momentum equation. They had been studying math their whole life. Meteorology is a math thing, and if you don’t know math, what are you doing here? Math was my biggest struggle.”

 

Instead of going to exams, Brant would get into his car, drive out in the middle of nowhere and watch the storms. He didn’t know the momentum equation but knew momentum when he saw it.

 

Brant flunked out that first year and decided to pursue a different field at a different school.

 

He graduated from Culver-Stockton College in Missouri, earning a history degree with the hope of teaching. However, with St. Louis still reeling from the recession, finding a teaching job was next to impossible. “I resigned to what I believe a lot of millennials did after the recession. I had to survive.”

 

Brant put on a suit and tie and handed out his resume to every business he could, willing to take anything.

 

“That was probably my lowest point – my self-worth and value were nothing. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

 

Brant got a job with a local heating and air conditioning company and was doing well when one day his mother questioned him about his passion for weather. “She said that everyone has that moment where they have to jump off the cliff and either you fail, or you succeed, but at least you tried.”

 

Brant loaded all his possession into his Ford Fusion and headed to Mississippi State to pursue his master’s degree in broadcast meteorology. This time things started to click. He graduated and was offered two jobs – one in Alpena, Michigan, and one in a familiar community called Rapid City, South Dakota.

 

For more than four years, Brant has been teaching the community about the awe and unpredictability of the Black Hills weather. After his two-year contract ended, Brant decided to stay at NewsCenter1, feeling a pull that he had not fulfilled his purpose here and had not yet figured out the craziness of western South Dakota weather. “I want to finish what I started, and I still haven’t figured out the Black Hills, but here is an honest review: I never will.”

 

Brant says he would likely be bored anywhere else.

 

“We get everything here except for hurricanes.” This is why he takes off two weeks every September to go to the Gulf Coast for hurricane season.  

 

His passion for what he does is contagious. Brant loves talking about the weather but loves even more teaching about the reasons behind it.

 

 

“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, but here I get to teach. I have the opportunity to empower people with information. I get to verify people’s experiences and give them the words to describe it. Weather belongs to all of us. Nature belongs to all of us. The experiences. The rollercoasters and emotions. The sadness and hard times. It belongs to all.”

 

Brant says his purpose is to reconnect humanity to the natural world.

 

“The way to do that is to remind people that everybody has a little nerd in them; everybody has a passion for their thing and should go after it; and that everyone has a little bit of passion for weather, they just don’t always know it.”