Walt, otherwise known by his soaring contest ID of “WX”, is a retired forecaster from the National Weather Service with over 42 years of experience including management of the Los Angeles ARTCC (FAA) Center Weather Service.
Graduating from UCLA in 1972 with a BA in meteorology coincided with the beginning of his glider flying in 1968. 

He is currently an active Standard Class racing pilot in his Discus 2A with over 4300 hours in gliders. Soaring forecast experience includes the 1983,1991 and 2012 U.S. Worlds and numerous other soaring competitions. He has provided operational weather support for the Voyager aircraft non-stop around the world flight in 1986 and forecast support for Perlan Steve Fossett's world altitude record attempts in 2004-2005. He is the 2008 Western Barron Hilton Cup winner for the longest Standard Class glider FAI triangle flight.

Since retirement in October 2010 Mr. Rogers has continued weather forecast support for the soaring community conducting remote or on-site briefings.  He is motivated in using the latest NWP models to extract soaring information using Unidata’s Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) software, BUFKIT and RAOB.com for time height cross section plots of the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL).

Mr Rogers is a member of the American Meteorological Society and an active National Weather Association member serving on the aviation committee.

Walt currently resides in Palmdale, California with his wife, Rose Marie and cat “Solito".