You don't need a weather expert to know which way the wind blows, but they sure can come in handy when dealing with tropical storms, nor'easters, blizzards, and historic rainfalls. And there's no weather service that has exploded in popularity... ever?... like New York Metro Weather, a website and Twitter account run by a small four-person team, including Steve Copertino, Miguel Pierre, and co-owners Doug Simonian and John Homenuk.
Homenuk says it was initially launched as a personal blog over a decade ago before slowly being built up into New Yorkers' favorite meme-saturated weather feed. They offer daily weather rankings, update their "realistic dew point" chart, and extoll on the vibes of the day; they also provide frequent, incredibly useful weather updates (sometimes with gifs) while mostly avoiding confusing weather jargon. They pride themselves on creating "hype free weather forecasts" that can inform locals while keeping a sense of humor about the inherent unpredictability of the weather-predicting business.
With New York Metro Weather about to launch their Patreon, we spoke to Homenuk about their origins, why the city seems to have a problem communicating with New Yorkers during weather emergencies, and what separates good vibes weather from bad vibes weather.
What is your meteorology background? And what was the thought behind starting New York Metro Weather as a website, in addition to the Twitter feed? My meteorology background goes back to when I started becoming interested in the weather when I was a kid. I was always fascinated by it. The story I always tell is, it was something that I knew I couldn't control and didn't really understand. So that sparked an interest in me, and I always knew it was what I wanted to do, what I wanted to study.
I attended Kean University, studied meteorology there. It was just a fantastic program, which I think they've rolled up into Earth sciences now. Starting while I was in high school and also into attending Kean University, I started a blog, and that was New York Metro Weather.
Pretty early on, it became clear it was going to be a cool little community, but I never really put an enormous amount of time into it. I was more focused on studying and potential jobs and things like that. I finished school in 2012, so it's been a long time now that it's been going on, but the idea behind it initially is exactly what it is today, which is: let's create a place where we can write about the weather in an easy-to-understand and digestible format and make it more simple for people to understand, and let's communicate the weather to the general public.
People love talking about the weather, and we love it too. We love forecasting it. So the idea behind it was to create a little bit of a community. It's blossomed really in the last year. I've had more time to dedicate to it recently, and putting the time and effort into it, we've seen the interactions increase, and people really love it, which has been really cool and really rewarding because it's something we started over a decade ago.
Besides the Twitter feed and the weather reports, you also do customized daily forecasts for specific clients, is that right? Yes, we do. We actually roll that into a separate company, though. We have a company called Empire Weather Consulting, which is a completely separate LLC, and we do customized forecasts for pretty much anyone. We have construction companies and landscapers; we do ski resorts, people that are like hedge funds trading natural gas prices, or the price of corn soybeans, things that are affected by the weather. And recently, [we've added] some school districts and things like that. It's really to provide a consulting service for people that depend heavily on meteorology.
If you're making a decision for your business or for people that depend on the weather, that's going to either cost you a ton of money or could put people in danger. It's simply not a good idea to just use an app and make your decision based on looking at your phone. We provide a consulting service where people can call us and say, "Hey, John, what's the deal? Can you help me out here?" And we try to open up those lines of communication to help people make decisions and understand how the weather is going to play out and what the forecast looks like in a more digestible manner than just going on an app or reading a technical discussion.
Is that where most of your revenue comes from? New York Metro Weather is an LLC, but we don't really have an enormous amount of revenue other than something coming up soon—we're about to launch our Patreon—but our revenue for Empire Weather LLC is completely separate. That's our full-time job. So we have our meteorology consulting, and that's on a national, even international, scale—we have some clients that we do the forecast for South America and things like that.
But the New York Metro Weather is local. And obviously, the focus on that is we all live here, so it's kind of a passion for us, and building a community around it is something that really is a focus for me. And basically, now that I have the time to really work on New York Metro Weather, we want to expand the community and post more fun things— we have a lot of cool things coming in the near future with merchandise and video discussions and interactive chats.
You're not affiliated with any other meteorology site or organization, you're entirely independent. So how are you getting the initial information to make your forecasts? Are you subscribing to National Weather Service reports? It's kind of multilayered. But weather models are a big part of putting together any forecast. And we refer to them as "model guidance" because you want to use the simulations to guide your forecast, but you want to have your forecast put together based on what's actually going on outside. A lot of that information is available online for free, anyone could go online and look at whatever weather models they want. The issue is people don't know how to interpret it necessarily. My mom jokes around all the time, she says, "I can go on the site and look at it, but I'm just looking at a bunch of colors and numbers, I don't know what this means."
So it's all freely accessible to some degree. There are websites that we subscribe to that are $50/month or a $100/month, and they produce higher resolution graphics, giving us the ability to zoom in on New York. We have different parameters we can look at. Most meteorologists are probably going through a very similar process when it comes to forecasting. They're all using similar weather models, looking at the same data, same observations, satellite, radar imagery. It's just a matter of how you interpret it and communicate it. And we tend to put a lot of work into making sure we communicate it properly to people. That's the big focus; we have all this jargon and mumbo jumbo, and there's this technical process, but we finish our forecast and we try to dedicate a whole other process to how we can communicate this properly so people can understand it.
To that point, how did you figure out New York Metro Weather's voice with the Twitter feed? Because obviously, that seems to be the thing that is resonating most with people. I mostly run the Twitter account. I think it was around this time last year. Before that, we had been pretty straightforward. I don't want to say...I struggle with the word to use, but it was just pretty generic, our tweets were fairly generic. We posted our forecast and our maps, people liked them and we interacted and had some fun.
I think it was about a year ago when it kind of hit me and I'm like, "Man, people just want to talk, they want to laugh a little bit. They want to have a conversation." We're all New Yorkers, right? Everyone here knows the deal, whether it's complaining about the weather or enjoying hearing about the weather or whatever people enjoy talking about it. So I thought, let's make the conversation more about what the impacts are going to be on the day-to-day New Yorker, that's commuting to work or walking to the coffee shop or going to happy hour. And instead of the jargon, let's just have a conversation and make it so people can understand what's going on. And since then, we've seen the interaction pick up and it's been a lot more fun for us too, just talking to people and getting to meet people and seeing the account grow.
And it seems as though you really embraced meme culture. So why do you think people have taken to it so much now? I feel like in meteorology, there's kind of this...maybe it's a stigma, but it's kind of like weather people are generally seen as being a little stuffy, right? So it's kind of like, here's the forecast, and weather people get offended when people joke around about us being wrong all the time. So my thought was, "You know what, let's take it the other way, because we are wrong a lot." The truth is, we're trying to predict the future. It's not an easy thing to do. So let's embrace the fact that we're wrong sometimes, let's have some fun with it. And I think what's happened is, with the memes and our honesty and the way we communicate, people have taken to it.
They're like, "You know what? These guys are doing a good job. They're really trying. They get the forecast right most of the time, but when they're wrong, they own up to it." Let's not be stuffy about it, let's not be upset when the forecast is wrong. And I think the memes are really fun. I've been on Twitter way too long, and so I'm pretty dialed in with the meme culture. I like to poke fun at ourselves.
Were you familiar with or influenced at all by—I'm thinking of a couple of antecedents to what you're doing—like David Lynch's weather reports or the ones The Awl used to do? I don't know if it's directly influenced, but there's a couple of other weather blogs that were a little more fun and lighthearted that popped up around the time that we did. That just made me feel better about the idea—seeing similar sites gave me the conviction that this could be a fun and cool thing for New Yorkers to have, that they'd embrace it. Knowing it was a possibility definitely impacted it, but I wouldn't say [we were] directly influenced by any specific site in the past.
Do you have a particularly favorite kind of weather Tweet? The ones that I really get a kick out of, and people are not going to like this, but the ones I really get a kick out of are when we tweet about the sunsets and Daylight Saving Time. When the sunset starts to pull back we'll tweet out, "This is the last sunset at 7 p.m. until May 2022." And people just hate it, and the responses are incredible and the memes are unbelievable. Our office laughs hysterically on the day that we tweeted that. We actually have one coming, we're going to be tweeting about DST ending next week. The sunset sometime next week is going to go back to like 4:40 p.m., which is insane, and people just lose their minds about that stuff. It is a fun time.
Do you have any strong feelings about Daylight Saving Time? Because I've spent a good amount of the last couple of years railing against the DST system... I agree with you a hundred percent. I think it's crazy. It's one of those things that just boggles the mind. I don't understand why it still happens. I don't know why. It's an age old thing and it just doesn't need to happen anymore. And it's one of those things that I feel like might never change, or is going to require some sort of huge push to get changed. But I think it is so ridiculous and it just doesn't make any sense to me. It just drives me crazy, it's nuts to me. There are some arguments on the other side that "it was designed for agriculture" or whatever. That's all fine and dandy, but it's 2021 and we don't need to have a sunset at 4:20 p.m. at all. Ever. So I'm very much in agreement with you about that.
So what are the key determinants in good vibes weather versus bad vibes weather? To me, the best way to describe this is when you walk out the door, what is your verbal reaction to the weather? If you walk out the door and you're like, "Oh God," that is bad vibe weather—if it's already annoying the minute you leave your apartment. Good vibes weather is when you walk out and you're like, "Oh wow, it's pretty nice out today." Because not only do you feel good when you walk outside of the house, but then after work you're hanging out at the park, or you're on your rooftop, or you're getting a coffee or a drink with someone.
And the thing I always say to people is, the weather is best when the weather can just fall into the background, you don't have to think about it too much. It's beautiful out, you don't have to worry about it. No one needs to check our Twitter. It's gorgeous, so we can kind of fall away. Those are the good vibe days. Whereas the bad vibe days, you walk out the door it's like, "Oh God, here we go again." It's obviously a very subjective, very loose definition, but that's kind of the way we roll with it.
In the city, is there one season in particular that you think has the best vibes? Definitely, definitely fall. And definitely the month of September. That month produces the most days that are in that sweet spot where it's between 65 and 75 degrees, the humidity is low, and it's not rainy outside. I would say specifically mid-September to the first week of October. We've had a ton of 10 out of 10 days [recently]. It's a little more than a month ago now, but mid-September had a string of seven out of 10 days that were 10 out of 10. And we just had a string last week too.
But it starts to go downhill pretty quickly in the next couple of weeks. And then obviously these days, the summer is just awful. It's just humid and instant sweat when you walk outside. So the autumn season in general, but specifically mid-to-late September, is kind of the wheelhouse for those great days.
So why isn't fall longer, and what can we do to make it longer? I've been wondering this for a very long time. I haven't come up with an answer yet, but I wish it was longer too. The warmth and humidity is lingering more in the last 10 or 20 years than it has in the past—there's some data to back it up and we did hit on this in a recent mailbag post. So summer is lasting a little longer into September than it has before. And there could be a lot of things causing that. It could be climate change, it could be local urban effects, which obviously is also tied into climate change. But regardless, it feels and seems, and the data backs it up, that heat and humidity and uncomfortable weather is lingering more into September than it has in the past.
So hopefully we figure out a way to make fall longer because it feels like it goes by in two weeks and we're into winter. And we're heading into peak complaining-about-the-weather season coming up. November is the worst, so we're dialing ourselves up for that. We're getting into November when your highs are in the 40s and it's raining all the time, and it just starts to get pretty brutal here.
It does seem like summer and winter in particular are always the longest seasons in NYC. Yeah, it does. And the thing about the data, it varies so much depending on the station you use. So at Central Park it seems like the summer is lasting longer, but it's a little different at JFK, and it's a little different at Islip or Newark. So we've got to really dive into the data before we make any claims about that. But spring and fall feel like they last just a couple weeks.
Thinking about Ida and a couple of other major weather events that we've seen in recent years, even going back to Sandy, why does it seem like the city is always a little behind on reacting to these major weather events? I want to preface this by saying I don't know exactly what goes on behind the scenes. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus or anything like that because I'm not there, I'm not in those offices or on those phone calls. But what it seems like to me, if I had to take my best guess, and what really came to the forefront during Ida, was that there are plenty of people working with the city to provide weather information. The city has a great team of emergency management people and I'm sure that all the people have good intentions, but it just seems like there is a breakdown going on in communication between the people providing the forecast information and then the people providing that information to the public.
So it's hard to say exactly where that breakdown area is, but something is going wrong. There's a missing link somewhere. Because leading up to Ida, it was clear for days that it was going to be a significant rain event. And the day of or the night before, it became clear it was potentially a life-threatening rain event. And there are graphics and tweets and all kinds of stuff to back that up. It was there, it happened. So what boggles my mind is, I guess I just don't understand how it could be so clear to us in the [weather] community [including] the people the city uses for the forecast, but that information doesn't get out to the public.
New Yorkers don't care if there's uncertainty, they just want to know about it.
That tells me that there is a breakdown there, where some group is not communicating properly and making this information digestible to people. That seems to be the major issue. And so when the city announced that they're going to hire another forecaster just for New York, or hire a bunch of forecasters, I was sitting there thinking that is just not going to help the problem. What they need is to have a group or some unit that is specifically responsible for communication. Making sure that whatever the forecast is, whatever the uncertainty is, it gets properly communicated to the people in charge and properly communicated to the general public at large in New York.
Because New Yorkers don't care if there's uncertainty, they just want to know about it. If you hear about a snowstorm and we come in and say, "Okay, it's going to probably be 6-10 inches, but there's a chance that it's going to be a lot more. And we just want to tell you that that possibility is there, we'll keep you updated," people will understand that. But if you come in and you say, "It's going to be 6-8 inches, here's the deal, schools are open," and then 18 inches fall, that's when people start to get really frustrated. Because they're like, "Why was that not communicated as a possibility?"
And so I think with Ida, it's another great example where people didn't know that it could have been potentially historic. Whereas that information, from a meteorology standpoint, was blatantly obvious for two days before. And I don't know why that wasn't communicated and that is what, in my mind, the focus needs to be for New York as a whole—trying to fix that communication and making sure that the people who make the decisions and then the general public understand the forecast as best as they possibly can.
Have you offered your services to the city yet? We have not. It's funny, we're still in that growing stage and we have a couple contacts... there's been discussions about maybe trying to reach out through certain channels, but we haven't. But we'd obviously love the opportunity to talk and work with them and maybe be those communicators, because I just think it helps everyone, right? People just want to know what's going on. They want to understand the forecast and what the uncertainty is, because weather has uncertainty, naturally. That's just the way it works.
