MeteorAHlogy ☈

About Me

BACKGROUND

Greetings! I am Andrew and have embraced a passion for understanding, forecasting, and communicating the weather and how it affects us since I was a toddler. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Meteorology from North Carolina State University in May 2019 with a minor in Environmental Science. Go Wolfpack! I currently work as a geographer in Northern Virginia and have done so since January 2020. I do tangentially work with meteorological data still, but I sought to rekindle my digital media presence to get back into the world of weather. Hence, MeteorAHlogy was born. I curate and operate this website in its entirety by myself. 

I am not affiliated with any syndicated news network or professional weather forecasting organization, nor am I an authoritative source – consult your local National Weather Service office for official weather forecast information at https://www.weather.gov/. This profile is for "freelance" weather forecasting, sharing my thoughts on weather and environmental ongoings, and for disseminating weather content that I find particularly interesting or relevant.

HISTORY

Born in South Carolina, lived in either Raleigh, Clayton, or Winston-Salem, NC from 1999-2019. Moved to Northern Virginia in early 2020 to start my career, but NC will always be home. I have aspirations to get back to the Old North State before too long.

This website is a continuation/improvement upon the idea of Andrew's Weather Center (AWC), which started as a high school science class project and went live for the first time on Facebook on 3 July 2011. Shortly after its inception, I garnered many followers and "fans" on Facebook (they were "fans" before "likes"), and I became sort of an amateur forecast center for the greater Triad area of North Carolina (Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem). A couple years later in early 2013, I visited with FOX8 Chief Meteorologist Van Denton and was lucky enough to get to watch the 10:00 PM newscast live from inside the studio. By this time, my once insignificant Facebook Page was reaching about 1,000 people around the Triad area and also a select few people from around the nation. I decided to step up my game and construct a webpage for AWC in late 2013 so that I could find and share even more weather information to people online. The website has since been through multiple iterations and continues to evolve into what lies within your screen here today. 

I administered the Facebook page, Andrew’s Weather Center (AWC), from July 2011 through mid-2020. At its pinnacle of popularity from 2013-2018, I was reaching user's news feeds from nearly every major city in North Carolina with many others tuning in just for my general posts sharing interesting weather information nationwide . AWC allowed me to post daily forecasts and musings about ongoing weather, interact with all kinds of people through the lens of meteorology, and taught me a significant amount about science communication. It was a great experiment that turned into almost a part-time job covering historic hurricane seasons, wild winter storms, tornado outbreaks, everyday thunderstorms, or whatever showed up on the horizon. I even garnered the attention of Jim Cantore on Twitter/X, the National Weather Service offices in Raleigh and Morehead City, NC, and many other weather enthusiasts who began to create their own forecasting pages.

I was definitely not the first "weather page" on Facebook, but I would like to think that I hopeully played a role in validating and inspiring those with a passion for weather forecasting and science to pursue their ambitions. As the digital age wears on, I, and other pages like mine, have had to carefully distinguish ourselves from misinformation, artifical intelligence, and "media-rologists," who fearmonger and catastrophize with fake weather information. The difference I employ is that I trudged through the calculus and atmospheric physics courses, completed my degree, and have earned the respect of many who followed my initial page. I hold no agenda and find no interest in appealing to certain groups or harvesting clicks. As I once saw my primary inspiration, Meteorologist Greg Fishel (formerly of WRAL), post online, "it is always more important to be correct than to be first." This space is about science and understanding it. Activity on AWC dwindled significantly in 2020 due to me beginning my professional career in Virginia. After that chapter of my life fell into routine, I brought MeteorAHlogy to life in October 2021 as the embodiment of my corner in the weather enterprise that I have always wanted.

CREDENTIALS

B.S. Meteorology from North Carolina State University (May 2019)

Co-authored a paper in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (June 2019)

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/58/6/jamc-d-19-0002.1.xml

Undergraduate Research Assistant at the State Climate Office of North Carolina (May 2016 - May 2019)

Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador (March 2017 - present)

Certified SKYWARN Spotter for NWS Raleigh (June 2014 - January 2020)

Member of the American Meteorological Society (June 2014 - present)

Member of the National Weather Association (June 2014 - present)

TECHNICAL/HARD SKILLS

Skilled in Microsoft Office applications, HTML/CSS, general web programming, ArcGIS software, Windows OS and iOS

Proficient in SQL, PHP, Linux/shell scripting, JavaScript, R, MATLAB, APIs, Oracle database administration

Familiar with Python, AWIPS, IDV

Learning more Python, Jupyter Notebook, QGIS

I am CompTIA Security+ certified through 2027 and have programmed several iterations of a website integrating meteorology with various disciplines.

CONFERENCES/SYMPOSIA ATTENDED

American Meteorological Society

Annual State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium (10 November 2018)

27th Annual NC State University Undergraduate Research & Creativity Spring Symposium (18 April 2018)

36th Annual Conference of the American Association for Aerosol Research - Raleigh, NC (19 October 2017)

MEAS-FER Research Symposium - NC State University (15 August 2017)

2016 Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference - Charlotte, NC (September 2016)

CITIZEN SCIENCE

CoCoRaHS Observer

Cornell University Lab of Ornithology

COMPETITIVE SUCCESS

WxChallenge - The North American Collegiate Weather Forecasting Competition

*The Tobacco Cup is a interstate challenge between all participating universities located in North Carolina (NC State, UNC Asheville, UNC Charlotte, UNC-Chapel Hill, etc.)


Fantasy Blizzard


Geocaching

FUTURE ASPIRATIONS

Nobody knows what truly lies ahead, but I do have some big ideas. You will notice that some of the data and content here is North Carolina-centric, and that is due to me having forecasting experience in North Carolina for eight years. Upon moving to Virginia, I realized the difficulty of remotely forecasting for another area when you are physically located elsewhere. Ergo, take a moment to imagine volunteers coming together from each of our fifty states to comprise a standardized network of meteorological and environmental information for the nation, but with content tailored to each regions' needs. That's where I want to go: to become a hub for meteorological and environmental data for North Carolina and serve as a model for others to build curated websites or online collections of data for each state - eventually piecing together a nationwide system for data acquisition, analysis, and archival.

My future goals and ambitions also include obtaining my Technician License to operate a ham radio, acquiring a National Weather Association Digital Seal of Approval, and earning the esteemed title of a Certified Consulting Meteorologist (CCM) through AMS. I do not hold a desire to pursue broadcast meteorology, but rather wish to bridge gaps between the weather, water, and climate enterprise and forge connections among the operational and research sectors of meteorology. My motivation comes from the ubiquity of weather – it touches every human on the planet in some form or fashion. No other force can be as consequential as the weather – so, I have, am, and will devote the time I have to studying it.