Pradeep John, Chennai’s most wanted amateur meteorologist, has been taking his fourth acetaminophen since Tuesday night. You haven’t slept in 24 hours, you have a severe headache and an overflowing inbox. “I know I’ll only fall asleep when cyclone Nivar departures, ”says the 38-year-old, who rose to stardom during the Chennai floods of 2015, when his accurate weather updates began to catch on. That was the year a number of amateur weather bloggers arrived on the scene. The city now has more than 50.
“Nivar is a complicated cyclone. So the pressure is immense, ”says Pradeep. “Every time there is news of a cyclone, people in the state relive two recent catastrophes: the 2015 floods and the Vardah cyclone of 2016. Each of the thousands of messages I receive is about the release of water from the dam. of Chembarabakkam, which caused the flood, or about the wind speed ”.
Pradeep opened his social media accounts in 2014 and only had 300 followers on Twitter, 5,000 on Facebook. He now has 3.4 billion followers on Twitter and twice that on Facebook. His posts on Nivar have around half a million hits.
“Chennai people are passionate fans of the weather in November and December,” says K Srikanth of the ChennaiRains social media watchdog. Anna Nagar’s entrepreneur and weather blogger, who started on Twitter in 2014, now has 112.6K followers. Rising to fame during the Chennai floods, Srikanth has started a non-commercial weather app of the same name. For the past three days, Srikanth has been recording his weather updates for 20 hours a day.
At Chennaiweather.org, Raja Ramasamy, who got hooked on rain stains 20 years ago when he was in Class X, tries to keep a low profile because he is inundated with questions every time there is a storm. He had 88,000 followers two days ago, but with the rain intensifying, so has his following, which has reached 91,600. Compare that to 2015, when you only had 4,000. “During the floods, when there was no power, we tweeted from our terraces using mobile phones, while official reports took much longer,” says Raja, a software professional.
Fans say they prefer amateur weather reports as they are accurate and easier to understand. “There is no jargon. The updates are more focused on how the weather is going to affect us, ”says Ajith M, a software professional in the city.
The official government handles updates less frequently and has fewer followers. ChennaiRmc of the Chennai Regional Meteorological Center, for example, has 1,055 followers, while Indiametdept, the Twitter manager of the Indian Meteorological Department, has 135.8K followers. The social media identifiers of all fans, however, carry the disclaimer that one must follow the IMD for all official weather forecasts. Still, in stormy weather, these fans are still the beacon.
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