Jill Gilardi

Jill Gilardi joined the WBRC First Alert weather team on December 30, 2013. She has nearly 10 years of experience as a broadcast meteorologist, serving audiences in St. Joseph and Springfield, Missouri, before moving to WOWT in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2011.

She’s covered blizzards, ice storms, floods, heat waves, and tornadoes. The day Jill calls the toughest of her career came less than a month after a very tough day for many folks in Alabama: It was May 22, 2011, the day of the Joplin EF5.

While working in Springfield, Jill won a honorable mention award for Best Weathercast.  Weather is a passion of hers, especially severe weather.  She started storm chasing in 2008 and even worked for a storm chasing company called Extreme Chase Tours.  She chases any opportunity she gets because Jill loves the weather, and seeing the entire life-cycle of a storm and capturing images of it.

Jill studied weather at one of the top schools for meteorologists in the country, Lyndon State College in Vermont, and also earned the Certified Broadcast Meteorologist Seal from the American Meteorological Society. She calls herself a weather nerd who has a way of communicating the weather and relating it to daily life in a fun and easy-to-understand way.

Jill is originally from Massachusetts and her passion for weather erupted after Hurricane Gloria in 1985.  From that point on, Jill became obsessed with tracking hurricanes and always wanted to be in thick of bad weather. She would beg her parents to either drive her around in 6 inches of snow or take her to the beach to see the waves from a tropical system.