David D'Arcangelo (1994 B.S., 2000 M.S.)
Energy Meteorologist

I graduated from Penn State in 1994 and earned a commission into the Air Force. My first duty assignment was at Andrews AFB, MD performing world-wide, aviation forecasts for Air Force One and other military missions. Working in a high-visibility environment allowed me to develop my communication skills and learn to make forecasts that identified risk and uncertainty. I subsequently worked at the Pentagon where I continued to support White House operations and also had the chance to forecast for many overseas locales. This world-view has proven crucial in understanding global weather patterns and learning to forecast by using models as only a means to make a forecast, not the only way. I returned to Penn State for my M.S. (’00) and then continued to work aviation meteorology for Delta Air Lines.

Despite the breadth of experience in the early part of my career I desired to utilize my expertise in an area where there was a direct, measurable financial impact to forecasts. The commodities world is such a place where your communication, forecasting and risk assessment skills are really “on the line” every day. My initial exposure into the commodities world was at Cinergy Corp. in Cincinnati – a natural gas and electricity utility that used forecasts to make operational and trading decisions. Over the course of 4+ years at Cinergy I had the privilege to hire and work with Mike Gasper and Richard Surace, both of whom are profiled on this web-site. They have taken different and interesting paths but are both ingrained in the risk management part of energy trading and are experts in this field. I left Cinergy in 2005 to join the commodities team at a private company. I continue to work with energy trading but have expanded into weather derivatives trading and agricultural commodities. There are many paths one can take to work in an environment where meteorology is a valued piece of information for making decisions about the financial value of a commodity. One prerequisite is solid communication skills and a desire to prove how good you are on a daily basis. Successful meteorologists in this field possess an ability to identify risk and summarize complex information quickly. The financial world moves fast and every day presents a new, often more-difficult challenge. I have been forecasting for 12 years and I am humbled almost daily in an effort to make and communicate more-skilled forecasts that assist my team in being more profitable. The commodities and financial markets are places where “risk-management” is a tangible, oft discussed and debated idea and weather plays the most significant role.