You realize 10 seconds into his forecast that there's something different about the weather according to Jim Kosek.

Well, maybe different is not exactly the right word.

"Different," he says, "sounds kinda bland."

After all, Kosek might be leaping off a chair during his forecast. Or sniffing the armpits of a stuffed groundhog. Or licking a cookie and then putting it back on the plate. Or confessing that he normally doesn't wear underwear.

Bland, he ain't.

The 43-year-old AccuWeather meteorologist is the main forecaster for Lancaster Newspapers' upgraded Web site, lancasteronline.com, which launches today. His forecasts can be seen Tuesdays through Saturdays.

Chances are Kosek is nothing like any other on-air forecaster you've seen.

He yells. He throws things. He runs in circles. He goes off camera, but keeps on talking.

On the Internet, where he plies his trade on various media Web sites, several clips of his forecasts have been posted on YouTube. He's also caught the attention of bloggers, who love him (even if they can't spell his name correctly).

Here's one's assessment: "So I check accuweather.com most mornings to find out how to dress for the day. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I get a little live forecast from Jim Kocek, freakin' scariest aggressive weatherman, er, meteorologist out there. He's so sick."

One poster says he's a mix of Bill Gates and Gilbert Gottfried. Another says of a Kosek forecast: "Feel the passion. Feel the spirit. Feel the insanity."

Internet posters have declared him "Weatherman for the Ages," a guy who adheres to the number-one rule of television, "Never be boring."

It's a little lesson he got in his early days at State College-based AccuWeather, where his boss encouraged him to be an entertainer, advice he ran with.

"I never wanted to be a boring weatherman," he says.

Kosek grew up outside of Wilkes-Barre. As a teen, he was more interested in the television part of weather forecasting, noticing, for example, that the local weather guy did his forecast outside.

"I thought it was more interesting than anything else people did at that time," he recalls.

From the Wyoming Valley he went to State College, graduating from the meteorology program at Penn State.

After a very short stint in officer training school for the U.S. Air Force ("One month exactly. The 5 a.m. wake-up call didn't last long."), he came to AccuWeather, a national forecasting service founded in 1962.

Then housed in a converted church and employing a little more than 100 people, AccuWeather was a place to hone his broadcasting skills, starting out on radio.

His first big on-air broadcasting break came on New Year's Eve 1999, when he got the chance to do hourly forecasts for MSNBC.

"The producer called, he liked it and the rest is history," he says, laughing.

AccuWeather has grown since those days, now employing 400 people, including about 20 on-air forecasters who work out of a modern, mirrored office building surrounded by giant satellite dishes in a State College industrial park.

Kosek does forecasts for radio, television, and Internet feeds for media outlets, Bloomberg and ABC — more than 60 forecasts a day in all.

When the weather has made big news, such as during major hurricanes or other events, Kosek has appeared on Fox News and CNN. He's done sports weather for the NFL and been on the BBC and even Al-Jazeera.

Kosek says he tailors his style to the occasion or the client — if they want serious, he can do serious.

Kosek is a "hard-core meteorologist," says AccuWeather video operations manager Trish Mikita.

The night before Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, Kosek was all business, going on Fox News and predicting that 80 percent of the city would be under water the next day, she says.

Kosek says his more relaxed, on-air personality has evolved over the years.

"It's definitely been a progression," he says. "You become so comfortable. You know what you can do and get away with."

Not that he occasionally hasn't crossed the line. He threw a bucket of road salt at the camera once, which didn't go over real big with the equipment folks at AccuWeather.

Kosek does his on-air broadcasts from a small studio, which has a box full of props including a cheesehead hat, a witch's hat, winter hats, a football, sunglasses, Mardi Gras beads and his most recent favorite, a stuffed groundhog that he tortured in the weeks leading up to Groundhog's Day.

Outside the studio, his personality is more subdued. The guy who lets it all hang out on-air seems uncomfortable when the subject turns to himself.

"When I first meet people, they say, 'I can't believe you're so quiet,'" he says.

He has a girlfriend, is a twin (to a sister), likes the movie "Caddyshack" and is an avid sports fan, who loves the Cowboys and the Spurs.

He says he's rarely recognized in public, though it has happened, including once in a bar in Ocean City, Md.

Not everyone likes his style, he admits.

"Every now and then I'll get an e-mail that says, 'Just give us the weather. Who the hell do you think you are?'" he says. "You can't please everyone."

He does the weather the way he does in part because he enjoys it.

"Honestly, sometimes I don't know until 30 seconds before I go on the air what I'm going to do," he says.

"Something pops into my head. I laugh at myself. And I just go ahead and do it."

CONTACT US: cstauffer@LNPnews.com or 481-6024