Joe Sullivan

Background

About Joe Sullivan

Joe Sullivan is a semi-retired meteorologist who served as the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Louisville, KY from 2007 through 2020. He spent more than 26 of his 33+ year NWS career in similar positions, working closely with emergency managers and the media. An Iowa native, Sullivan earned his B.S. in Meteorology from Iowa State University. He worked as a TV meteorologist in Waterloo, IA and Springfield, MO before joining the NWS in 1987. Prior to his position in Louisville, Mr. Sullivan’s NWS career included assignments in Springfield, MO, Concordia, KS, Grand Island, NE, Des Moines, IA, Cheyenne, WY, Riverton, WY, and the NWS’ Central Region Headquarters in Kansas City, MO. Throughout his career, Sullivan strove to improve the ability of the NWS to communicate weather knowledge to protect lives and property. Among his contributions, Joe invented the “bullet format” that is now the NWS standard for warnings. He earned a Department of Commerce Silver Medal in 2001 for helping make Doppler radar available on the NWS’ web sites and in 2002 was awarded the NWS' highest honor - the Isaac Cline Award - for helping save the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars in communications expenses. In 2020, the Kentucky Association of Mitigation Managers named Sullivan their Mitigation Manager of the Year, and in 2021 he was inducted into the Kentucky Emergency Management Association’s Hall of Fame. Since retiring from the NWS, Sullivan has been working part-time with Kentucky Emergency Management, continuing his passion to help protect lives and property from severe weather and to serve as a weather resource to emergency managers in the Commonwealth.