Weather: So hot right now

By
Thursday, 11 August 2011

People send more than 200 Tweets per minute about the weather. When conditions turn severe, weather-related Tweets double, as people share powerful personal stories along with reports of hurricanes, heat waves and blizzards.

Starting today, The Weather Channel and Twitter have teamed up to bring you real-time Tweets about the weather on The Weather Channel itself, weather.com, their mobile apps. The Weather Channel has created Twitter accounts for more than 200 U.S. cities that will tweet regular local forecast updates. Now, you can follow your local weather account to stay in the know.

These accounts join a wide variety of other Twitter accounts that provide news, color and commentary around weather events, from the mild to the extreme:

  • @ReedTimmerTVN is a tornado chaser from Discovery Network’s Storm Chasers program, tweeting his storm-chasing successes and failures.
  • @AlRoker, the weather and feature anchor on NBC News’ TODAY show, tweets humorous weather news and anecdotes from across the US.
  • @USATodayWeather USA Today was the first national newspaper to publish a weather map; now, it tweets relevant forecast information all day long.
  • @I80Chains, an account for Northern California’s Interstate 80, reports when snow chains are necessary to travel over mountain passes due to inclement weather.
  • @KarlTheFog tweets humorous updates to San Franciscans based on current fog status.
  • @capitalweather lets folks near Washington DC keep up with weather-related news
  • @JackatNWS, the National Weather Service administrator, tweets about major national US weather events.
  • @usnoaagov tweets interesting facts and stories from the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere.
  • @wunderground tweets and retweets major local weather events from around the world
  • #wxreport: people in the U.S. can include this hashtag in their Tweets to report local weather conditions to the National Weather Service.