Hyderabad: The lockdown season has seen the sprouting of a new brand of amateur weather forecasters, who use the tools available at their disposal to spread information about thunderstorms, or lightning, to their social media followers.
Some of them are as young as 16. They started it all in a casual manner then it turned into a passion. T Balaji, for example, has completed his intermediate and appeared for the Eamcet. He is an astute observer of the weather and tweeting about it since last year.
“As a child I was always intrigued by the changes of weather. When I reached Class 10, I started reading about the weather features. When the lockdown came in, I started sharing the weather updates as and when I got some information. The lockdown season gave me a lot of time to update myself,” he told Deccan Chronicle. His twitter account is styled as Telangana Weatherman.
The 16-year-old won fame when the city was flooded in October last year. “I took this as a chance to give people the updates every minute. It was after the floods that people got back to me and thanked me for my service,” he said.
To keep abreast of the change in weather, he takes assistance from other weather observers from social media.
In Andhra Pradesh, Sai Praneeth, a software engineer by profession, is now a weather enthusiast. He began giving weather updates on twitter in September last year. “I give information about the weather anytime I am free. I get my information from various sources which include international websites. I study them all and make my own analysis. I began giving updates about the weather from 2013. The floods last year brought about a change in the number of alerts I gave.” His twitter account is titled Andhra Pradesh Weatherman.
