Channel 11 meteorologist6/19/2023 Two years later, as Sundgaard sues his former employer for discrimination, we discuss his new gig, why he can’t really talk about his old one, and what he thinks about the social media landscape two years into a grueling pandemic. KARE 11, which had employed Sundgaard since 2006, wrote a Facebook post of its own, saying, “Due to continued violations of KARE 11’s news ethics and other policies, we have made the decision to part ways with Sven Sundgaard.” He was abruptly fired in April 2020 for reposting a Facebook message from his rabbi, Michael Latz, formerly of the Shir Tikvah Synagogue, in which Latz called anti-lockdown protesters white nationalists. Meteorology is an important aspect of Sundgaard’s identity-as is his proud standing in the LGBTQ community and his adopted Jewish faith-and doing it full time again matters so much because of how painful his expulsion from the forecasting fraternity was. “ once I realized I was obsessed with weather, it clicked for me that, Oh, this actually has a use and application.” “I failed algebra in eighth grade,” he says. It was his fixation on winter precipitation that changed his life. He also shares a real estate business with McEachren, but Sundgaard has been obsessed with the weather since he was a ski jumper hoping for snow as a little kid. “I’m pretty much doing full-time weather again,” he says of his new job doing morning weather on MPR with Cathy Wurzer, paired with a Bring Me the News weather gig and a Patreon subscription he offers to hard-core weather nerds. He says it was magical, showing me pics on his phone of the monarchs huddled in the Mexican rainforest, but that he’s happy to be home. The two of them just returned from a two-week monarch-butterfly-stalking trip in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic mountain range outside of Mexico City-their first trip abroad in a year and a half. He walked through the bright, sunny -10° windchill to meet me at Spyhouse near the condo in the North Loop that he shares with his boyfriend, Robert McEachren. He says so far this winter has been legit cold-but with long-term climate trends, Minnesotans only have a 25 percent chance each year at what used to be a good old-fashioned teeth chatterer. Minnesota’s most physically ripped weatherman grew up on a hobby farm in Cottage Grove where video games were banned by his farmer/3M scientist dad, forcing young Sven to spend as much time as he could outside. “I changed my attitude toward winter from dread to embrace,” he says. His curiosity about changing weather patterns still shapes his current outlook on life. Sven Sundgaard has been a romantic about the snow and cold since he started monitoring snowfall as an eighth-grade ski jumper. Sundgaard’s personal forecast calls for more sunshine these days.
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