Sven Sundgaard Is Back on the Air

After more than a year on the sidelines, longtime KARE 11 meteorologist Sven Sundgaard is back in his happy place, nerding out about the weather live on air thanks to a new gig at MPR.

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Sven Sundgaard has been a romantic about the snow and cold since he started monitoring snowfall as an eighth-grade ski jumper. His curiosity about changing weather patterns still shapes his current outlook on life.

“I changed my attitude toward winter from dread to embrace,” he says.

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. 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.

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. 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 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.

“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 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. It was his fixation on winter precipitation that changed his life.

“I failed algebra in eighth grade,” he says. “[But] once I realized I was obsessed with weather, it clicked for me that, Oh, this actually has a use and application.”

He says he got As from there on out.

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. 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. 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.”

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.

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I was always fascinated that you and Jana Shortal, your former KARE 11 colleague, both converted to Judaism around the same time.

Isn’t that bizarre?

Well, it’s unique just in the fact that Judaism is a great world religion and they don’t—

Seek out new members. I think both Jana and I think that is bizarre, in a fascinating, spiritual way. Totally two different journeys, but any two converts have a unique connection, I think, and so they are automatically drawn to each other and their stories. But, I mean, everybody who’s born Jewish is always fascinated by it, too. Dave Schwartz, sports guy at KARE, said, “My only problem with you converts is that you didn’t have to have the overbearing Jewish mother that I did.” And I’m like, “You haven’t met my mother, Dave. She’s overbearing, but she’s Norwegian.”

So why did you convert?

I grew up Lutheran, obviously, like anybody with the name Sven. It was odd—whenever I made a good friend, or maybe it was somebody I was dating, I would find out after the fact that they’re Jewish, and I’m like, “Well, why am I drawn to Jewish people so much?” There aren’t that many in Cottage Grove, especially. And then I went to Israel for the first time in 2009, and it really came together for me. It was very odd—it felt like home in a weird way.

Something spoke to you.

The tradition for converts to Judaism is that they were actually always Jewish—they had a Jewish soul. The idea is that a Jewish soul is being reunited with the Jewish people. And as a scientist, I understand how bizarre anything spiritual or cosmic sounds. So, when I went back a year later I brought some friends with me because Tel Aviv also has an amazing Pride—only one in the Middle East, obviously. At the end of the trip, I’m like, “Well, what’d you guys think?” And they’re like, “Oh, it’s fun.” And I’m like, “Would you come back?” “Sure.” “Do you feel anything else?” And they were like, “Well, it’s a cool place.” So, I was like, OK, maybe there’s more to my personal draw here. I converted in May 2011.

So, is Rabbi Latz your rabbi?

Yes, and he was one of three rabbis who converted me. You have a beth din, a rabbinical court who presides over the final conversion. His in-laws barely escaped Nazi Germany before it was too late.

When you shared Rabbi Latz’s Facebook post calling anti-lockdown protesters “white nationalist Nazi sympathizer gun fetishist miscreants,” what was the upside of that?

Well, I can’t talk about any of that, actually, with the legal stuff going on.

How has Rabbi Latz informed your understanding of social justice?

Well, for starters, he was one of the original clergy from multiple faiths to push for Minnesota’s gay marriage law. You recall we were one of the first states to legislate it legally rather than going through the courts.

Can you talk about just social media in general? You met your significant other on Instagram. And during the pandemic, we’re so isolated from each other that sometimes social media is the only way we’re interacting.

I mean, I do think we have it to blame for the polarization in our country. Like you say, during the pandemic, people just aren’t together as much, but also, it’s so easy to just listen to your own tribe, as it were. And whether we can all blame Mark Zuckerberg explicitly for that—I don’t think it’s any one person’s fault. But I do think the misinformation train, wherever that’s all coming from, is partly to blame. It’s easy to stoke the flames on social media. And people just don’t talk to each other that much anymore.

During the pandemic and during your transition from your last employer to Bring Me the News and now MPR, have your feelings about how you use social media changed?

I use it pretty much solely for weather content, and I think that’s the best use of it for me right now. And I think people just generally need to step back and have conversations with each other, like actual conversations. That’s what I missed about traveling, too. I just got back from my first time out of the country in a year and a half. Mexico City is full of expats, and some of them have some pretty crazy ideas, but ultimately you realize when you sit and talk to people, we all have a lot more in common than we do apart.

How is social media polarizing us, in your opinion?

There’s a lack of critical reasoning. I don’t know if that’s decreased at all, but as a scientist, you’re just supposed to be skeptical of most things anyway. Even if you want to agree with every word of it, you’re first like, “OK, well, wait, let’s look this over first.” And people do their own research on vaccines or whatever it is. People think they get an opinion on things that they don’t necessarily know about. There’s an article I read months ago: an open letter written by climate scientists, addressed to medical doctors, saying, “Now you know what we’ve been dealing with for 20 years, where people think that they know better about the climate.”

Right. Everybody’s an epidemiologist now.

We used to trust each other more, I think. If your doctor said something, you maybe didn’t unquestioningly follow it, but you took it pretty seriously, right? Now if your doctor says you have high cholesterol, you’re like, “No, I googled it, and I don’t think I do.”

I was thinking about your identity as a gay man and a Jew, and about how just being who you are online may be a political act.

Depending on how somebody thinks, yeah.

You joined both of these communities publicly in your 20s. Did you ever feel discriminated against?

I had just turned 30 in 2011. I don’t think I had it as bad as a lot of us. I was never beat up; I was never really harassed for being gay, maybe because my voice is masculine. But definitely as somebody who knows that they’re probably gay and you see that kid getting picked on, you’re like, “Oh, shit, this is not an easy path to go.” And I think everybody, myself included, as a kid, you think, “God, please make me not be this way.”

So, when you came out as gay at 21, was it a cathartic experience?

It was difficult because when you know you’re going into a science field, which is still, as bizarre as it sounds, conservative with maybe a lowercase C, you’re expected to dress a certain way and behave a certain way. And once I realized that I was going to go the media route, at that time, there weren’t openly gay people on TV. This was just after Ellen came out, and that didn’t go well. So, you have that in the back of your mind: How do you balance being who you are in a world where that’s not acceptable yet? That’s the Jana story, too—feeling like she had to fit into the typical feminine, female anchor role.

You’re very open with your identity now, obviously. Very public about it. Does that ever feel like a political statement?

No. But what’s funny is I tell the youth now, we forget that it was a 2015 Supreme Court decision on gay marriage—it’s been less than 10 years. And to go back 12 years ago, posting a picture with my boyfriend and holding hands, a lot of people would’ve seen that as political because, automatically, they’re going to say, “Oh, he supports gay marriage.” Well, now that’s a settled thing. You still have a fringe group of society that thinks that it’s not right, but it’s funny how those things change over time. I hope that climate change gets there too. The poll numbers are changing a little bit on that, but, yeah, I don’t know who’s to blame for making it political.

When you see these massive trends, they must inform the underpinnings of your conceptual understanding about how the system works.

I think a lot of people think that meteorologists are just taught climate change, like it’s a belief system. It’s not. Science is about showing you the data, and you make your own conclusions. And you really don’t have any more conclusive thing than climate change. I honestly started out fairly skeptical, but the amount of research we’ve had now in the last 10, 20 years is just astronomical.

Do you consider yourself a journalist?

No, because I don’t have a journalism background. My degree is solely meteorology.

As a meteorologist, when did you have enough data to change your own mindset, and how did that change how you reported on the weather?

It was a gradual process, but I would say by the late 2000s, it was really becoming apparent that after forecasting and monitoring the weather of Minnesota every day for 10-plus years, clearly, you can look at the numbers and say something’s changing. Because in 2002, you can say, “OK, this year’s warm, but then the ’90s were just a couple years ago and ’96 was a cold February.”

And did KARE’s attitude about how you were supposed to report on the meteorology change during this time?

I think at that time, newsrooms were still trying—every newsroom is unique, but people are still trying to figure out how to cover this.

Did you ever have conversations about it?

Well, I can’t even really talk about that, because there’s related issues there.

Do you think the way local networks cover climate has changed? Should it change?

I think if you watched any number of newscasts—you’d have to look at a large enough span of time—but I think you would see a notable difference now from a decade ago, in the right direction. Absolutely. There are definitely still meteorologists who won’t talk about it, but that’s more probably to do with their personal politics.

Is that their choice, do you think?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I can’t name names. People will mix their politics with science, and then that gets dirty.

So, you’re on the radio now.

I’m going to let it all go. Finally.

How will the world relate to you differently?

I think it’s better going into it after people know me already. Trying to become known on radio, I think, is a lot harder. Everybody knows Cathy Wurzer, but she’s been doing it for a long time.

You mean you can’t just throw some thirst traps on Instagram to get your MPR numbers up?

Probably not. The MPR audience is serious.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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