HELLO THERE, DONNA

Dear Donna: We hear your cheerful mechanical voice out of Caribou every day, giving us the weather prediction and sometimes a thunderstorm warning. Your voice on the National Weather Radio is a welcome improvement over Perfect Paul. He was state of the art when he started four years ago but had gotten monotonous and tiresome. The folks at Caribou called him Arnold (as in Schwarzenegger) and at the National Weather Service headquarters they called him Sven or Igor, thinking he sounded either Scandinavian or Slavic.

You sound just plain American – classy American at that. Your local coach, Hendricus Lulof, likes you, too, but he has some more fine-tuning to do. You keep saying, “partly cloddy,” and you were saying “miles per hour” for wind speed until they taught you to say “knots.” You hesitate over the word “temperature,” so that it comes out “tem … perature.”

Your partner, Craig, hasn’t been heard much yet. He’s still in training, learning, for one thing, to pronounce “Aroostook.” He eventually will share the microphone with you. He shows promise. Samples of his work have the precise diction of some of those National Public Radio announcers.

Farther south, at the weather station in Gray, Meteorologist Art Lester thinks both of you need more work and still uses mostly Perfect Paul. And Mr. Lester has reservations about the names Donna and Craig. He thinks they sound “too white bread” and would prefer something like Dorcas and Dirk.

As for you, Donna, stick with it. We like your on-air invitation to make suggestions by telephoning 207-496-0143 or sending an e-mail. The proper address is mark.turner@noaa.gov. If we sometimes find fault, it’s only because we care.