One of the reasons I love Twitter is because it really does give you the most up-to-date real time updates, and with the huge impending snowstorm 2015 headed my way, it makes it super helpful to stay on top of the weather. Parent translation: how much bread, milk, eggs, and other french toast ingredients (ha) I need to stock up on and how long my kids will be out of school.
As you probably guessed, there are a bajillion Twitter feeds tweeting about the snowstorm, so I narrowed it down to the best Twitter feeds I’ve found that offer the most helpful weather updates.
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You might already be following the Weather Channel, which gives you real time information about weather all over the country, but during a big weather event, I like how they share their followers’ photos so you can see what’s happening near you. As you’d expect, they tweet out other helpful information, videos, and weather graphs, which you weather nerds will really appreciate.
For fairly comprehensive storm coverage, I’m digging Weatherbug, which does a great job of aggregating weather information from lots of different sources. Whether you’re looking for air travel updates, photos and graphs, road closures, or just weather commentary from various meteorologists, it’s a great, relatively undiscovered account worth following.
I like the short, succinct tweets (read: no photos or videos) from the AccuWeather forecasters on @BreakingWeather that focus specifically on the most current weather events. Also known as, breaking weather, as you might have guessed. This means for the next few days, you’ll be getting highway and airport closures, snow counts, and pretty much everything related to snowstorm 2015–and not so much what’s happening somewhere like Portland. (No offense to Portland. We love you).
In addition to the networks, there are no shortage of individual weather reporters and meteorologists on Twitter, however these two guys are really worth following. I swear it’s a coincidence that they’re both named Eric.
A CBS News reporter out of Boston, Eric’s personality-filled feed features weather-related updates along with clever commentary, and personal tweets that are reasonable and not sensational. What a change from most local weather Tweet streams.
I’ve always enjoyed meteorologist Eric Holthaus’s weather pieces on Slate.com, so it’s no surprise he’s a must-follow Twitter feed for me. While he provides plenty of helpful information about snow counts and closures, he shares links to interesting articles, and intersperses funny retweets that help lighten the mood.
Your Local News Stations
If you’re looking for local updates that provide information specific to your are, your best bet is to check your local news stations–and that means, go beyond your local network TV affiliates.
I do really like the National Weather Service twitter feeds by city, including Boston (above), New York, and Philadelphia, though they are going to be only for larger metropolitan areas rather than super local.
Also check some of your news radio feeds, like 1010 WINS in New York, which offers the kinds of tweets and retweets that only locals would care about, like All broadway shows have canceled performances tonight.
Finally, you can check the 400 or so hashtags that people are using, including #Blizzardof2015, #Juno, and my personal favorite, #Snowmageddon2015. You’d think maybe we could lock on one, but nope. No such luck.
Top photo: garethferrari via Compfight cc