Page 7 - BusinessWest May 27, 2024

In creating daily content, Hayes gets his own assistance from multiple sourc- es, gathering data and modeling from the National Weather Service, other meteorologists, and personal weather stations, then creates his own forecasts and analysis that people from across Massachusetts and parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut have come to rely on.
“I’m not a meteorologist,” he said. “I pay for subscriptions, and I get forecast discussions and other data from meteo- rologists in the Northeast region I’ve come to rely on and trust. I take all that information and use my own process to produce my reports.”
The next phase for Hayes will be a mobile app, which he plans to intro- duce in 2025, and which will replace the social-media presence.
“Three out of four people look at my info from their smartphone, so I figured I need to have a way to reach people more directly, especially dur- ing the summer severe events,” he
“The way we watch the forecast has traditionally been on TV; you consume the forecast, and that’s it. There’s no conversation about it. What I’ve tried to create with social media is
a two-way street where we can go back and forth and answer as many questions as we can.”
explained. “Winter storms develop more slowly. You see them building across the country over three or four days. But thunderstorms, micro- bursts, and tornadoes can form with- in five, 10, or 15 minutes.”
He plans to offer both free and paid versions of the app with differ- ent features, and will definitely retain the all-important interactive aspect, with users able to comment. After all, that may be the most compelling and popular aspect of his passion turned unlikely career.
“The way we watch the forecast has traditionally been on TV; you consume the forecast, and that’s it. There’s no conversation about it,” Hayes explained. “What I’ve tried to create with social media is a two-way street where we can go back and forth and answer as many questions as we can.”
It essentially adds another dimen- sion to weather reports, one he’s been delighted to find so many people are passionate about.
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“People are talking to each other — ‘I got this much snow in Belchertown.’ ‘Oh, I got this much down in Palmer.’ It’s a whole community vibe around something that we all have to deal with. Everyone has unique lives, but we all have to deal with the weather. So by fostering this community, we can all talk about what’s impacting all of us.”
It also lends an element of “ground truth” in real time, he added. Because a temperature difference of a degree or two can turn rain into snow quickly, not only can he quickly adjust a report based on comments, but a weather forecast becomes not a static report, frozen in time, but a living, evolving thing.
Seeing the Light
Speaking of evolving, Hayes has taken note of the trend toward warmer, wetter winters over the past decade, as well as more flooding events. But he says he’s not a climatologist and con- tinues to focus on his bread and butter — forecasting, reporting, and talking about each day’s weather with a grow- ing fanbase in the tens of thousands.
Even “space weather,” as he put it, got plenty of attention recently, as fol- lowers snapped, shared, and comment- ed on photos of the aurora borealis making a rare appearance across the U.S. on May 10. With the solar maxi-
mum not having hit its peak yet, such a shared experience might happen again within the next year or so.
“It was beautiful and otherworldly; humans think they’re amazing, and
it really puts things into perspective, shows how small we are,” Hayes told BusinessWest. “But you don’t want too many solar storms. The Carrington Event in 1859 fried the entire telegraph system. One hundred and sixty-five years later, we’re a lot more reliant on the power grid for a lot of things. So while the aurora is fun to see, I don’t want to see it too often.” BW
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