The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
For Twitter meteorologists, snowstorms are the Super Bowl
STAMFORD — Brad Ritchie follows the weather. It has always been his thing.
When he lived in Florida, Ritchie had his own weather station, where he could track climate patterns from the comfort of his own home. While he lives in Stamford now, he wants to get another one when he moves back to Florida.
“I’m not a meteorologist. I just have an interest in weather, so it’s fun to follow people who are in school for meteorology or meteorologists who run their own web services because you can interact with them,” Ritchie said. “I like because I can continue to learn and try to get better.”
Ritchie tracked Monday’s winter storm for the greater part of the last week, and his enthusiasm isn’t isolated. In Stamford alone, there are a handful of frequent tweeters on the world of meteorology. For them, the recent snowstorm was like the Super Bowl.
“Big snows and storms just get us excited — very similar to chasers, people who chase tornadoes, thunderstorms, hurricanes, et cetera,” said Laurence Tobias, another longtime weather afficionado in Stamford.
Tobias, who follows “dozens of weather geeks” online, reports his latest findings to his 1,000-plus followers almost religiously. Each is filled with detailed insights into the conditions outside of his Newfield home.
“I think we all appreciate the power of nature and like to experience it, one way or another,” Tobias said. “And big snowstorms are not that common along the I-95 corridor. They happen much more frequently… inland. So, when it does happen here, it’s a big deal.”
Tobias has his own weather station in his Newfield home, and equipment is scattered across his roof and porch. Through a combination of his own equipment and stats from the National Weather Service, he reports back to the online cohort with a picture of what is happening in Stamford.
Online, an eclectic mix of enthusiasts and professional meteorologists traded inch counts Monday for the snowfall and posted videos of heavy flakes whipping across the sky throughout the storm. At the end of their tweets, laden with references to snow bands and wind speeds, they linked to brightly colored weather maps.
Some professional meteorologists post “nowcasts” on Twitter, which Ritchie follows during inclement weather days, on top of whatever is predicted on TV. Nowcasts focus on shortrange weather patterns, like the amount of snowfall in a given hour, instead of the bigger picture forecasts on the morning news.
“You get more information than you would by just watching News Channel 3 or 6,” Ritchie said.