Weather People

If for nothing else, the six-year Channel 51 weather veteran's nightly report is notable because of the angle at which the satellite map is tilted, with Cuba a more prominent presence than on any other station in town. The maps take a tumble, however, due to the preferred color scheme - overcooked-salmon pink for land, combined with the standard gray cloud overlay - a satellite photo that's virtually indistinguishable from a Jackson Pollack painting. (To make matters worse, a wartime attempt at depicting the meteorological state of affairs in el Golfo Persico resulted in the unfortunate transposition of letters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to spell out Er Raid.) Blame it on the graphics department: like Javier Romero at Channel 23, Martin says they're the ones who supply the computer manipulations.

Martin and his back-up, Lazaro
Dominguez, don't do much forecasting on their own (neither does Channel 23's Romero); for the most part they rely on what the National Weather Service predicts. "I go to bed every night with my wife and baby and the Weather Channel," Martin confesses, adding somewhat cryptically that forecasting the weather is "common sense more than anything else, like a domino game.