The general public knows Paulusma mainly from his daily weather update at SBS6. He did this from a constantly changing outdoor location in the Netherlands and invariably closed the message with the Frisian pronunciation ‘oant moarn’, which means ‘see you tomorrow’.
‘I can do this’
Paulusma’s interest in the weather arose in the late 1970s with a TV course from Teleac. “I started that course after a night out with a friend in Franeker”, the weatherman tells me Omrop Fryslan. “That was in a snowy winter. It first rained, then it turned into freezing rain. I said then: this is going wrong. And the next day we had a lot of snow and nobody could go to work. Then I thought: this is possible. I do.”
At the beginning of his career as a weather forecaster, Paulusma still worked at the PTT, but in the years that followed it became more and more serious. He joined the German weather service and bought a large, heavy printer to print weather maps. He arranged to receive scientific guidance to gain a better understanding of the weather.
To be first weather reports Paulusma made for the Franeker Courant. Then came the radio, the Friesch Dagblad, RTV Noord and numerous other media. When Omrop Fryslân started with television broadcasts in 1994, Paulusma presented the weekend weather reports from the studio in Leeuwarden.
The editor-in-chief at the time was Sjoerd Ybema: “I had seen the broadcast with Piet and we quickly decided: we have to go outside.” From that moment on, the weather talk went out. At first from the terrace next to the studio, but not much later always from another location in the province.
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