Much of Kahl’s work is at the computer, converting reams of data into models, but he’s also been brushed up against the role of the international man of intrigue. More about that later.

Kahl, his wife Carol Waldvogel, and their son and daughter are Glendale residents. Waldvogel is director of the North Shore Suzuki Strings. Kahl’s children and 55 other fresh faces come to the house each week to take lessons and make beautiful music.

From his research and teaching, Kahl knows what happens in Turkmenistan may influence Argentina. He likes to talk about "interactive scales." "In Wisconsin, on average, the weather changes every three to five days. It also changes with the seasons; these scales we’re used to. When we enter a period of several years where
the temperature incrementally but steadily increases, we worry about global warming. The scientist’s job is to figure out if this is a linear
progression or is this merely the beginning of an increase that if compared to the swing of a pendulum is somewhere on one end of the arc. In a few hundred years, might the pendulum return and the Earth find itself in another ice age? This is a scale we’re not accustomed to."

So, Kahl makes "inferences by proxy means" from places like the Greenland ice core. "I’m interested in the meteorological effects on air pollution. We can track over long distances substances like acid rain and radioactive debris to remote areas of the world. The Arctic is a great resource. It has little light and a stable atmosphere; the air just stays once it gets there. By the way, what’s called Arctic Haze is real; the area is more polluted than any East Coast city. In the past, whatever got into the atmosphere was embedded in that era’s layer of ice so we can drill down and analyze air bubbles for chemicals in ancient atmospheric snow. Then we try to figure out where was this air before it came here. In the way people infer the age of a tree by counting rings, we can tell if the air traveled over land, oceans or both by its chemical signatures." Which leads us to those Russian scientists.

When Kahl first started his research, he chanced on an obscure Internet reference to Soviet weather stations positioned on drifting ice. The Soviet scientists kept impressive records for more than 40 years including the data from the ice floes and weather balloons. Kahl found himself flying to Siberia to begin a cooperative effort known as U.S.-Russia Working Group VIII to participate in a study named Influence of Environmental Changes on Climate. "The Russian scientists are so good. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union they have to be extra creative because there’s no money for new equipment."

An example of this creativity is that of a former Soviet air force officer stuck in Siberia with a huge fleet of aircraft the country could no longer afford to fly. "He thought he could get funding for operating the planes if they were used for international climate studies efforts." That’s why Kahl found himself in a bi-plane outfitted with skis landing on ice floes at 30 degrees below zero.

Kahl could devote his entire time to giving sophisticated papers at international symposiums like the Arctic Science Conference or the American Meteorological Society, and he’s given plenty of them. He could write only arcane articles for journals like the "International Journal of Climatology" or the "Journal of Atmospheric Technology." He’s written about 50 of those. But Kahl has taken the importance and impact of weather to a special audience: children. He has authored six books in their language. One of them, "Hazy Skies," has won several awards. He’s also written the award winning National Audubon Society "First Field Guide to Weather," which has over 200,000 copies in print. He says, "I think some adults like it, too."

Work and family responsibilities cut into Kahl’s private reading time, but he finds ways to combine them. "I read all the time with my children. We’ve gone through all the Harry Potter stories, Orson Card’s ‘Ender’s Game’ sci-fi series with my son and Marion Bradley’s ‘Avalon’ series with my daughter. I like non-fiction books about the Arctic, for example, ‘North to the Night’ by Alvah Simon, ‘North: Nature and Drama of the Polar Wild’ by Kaare Rodahl and ‘Arctic Dreams’ by Barry Lopez." Perhaps having spent so much virtual and real time in the Arctic, Kahl’s fiction tastes migrate south to the heat and color of the tropics. His favorite novelist is Nobel winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He’s read "Love in the Time of Cholera," "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" and enjoys the magical realism of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Speaking of magic, he owns an impressive looking hard cover set of J.R.R.Tolkein’s, "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. "Over the years, I’ve probably read it 30 times."