Changes to How I Issue Weather Reports in the Future

As my readers know, I left major social media over a year ago. Since then I’ve tried out a few privacy-oriented social media and messaging platforms, even eliminating those down to a handful.

I’m announcing that I have completely left social media in all forms and will no longer be using it personally or for weather-related posts moving forward. I’ve realized that social media in general is a time waster and not a productive use of my time in general. Since I have recently begun my PhD dissertation, I need to focus on investing my time in areas that pay off, not wasting it on social media. I’ve also dramatically scaled back my overall news consumption to a single daily newsletter and a weekly podcast, since consuming massive amounts of news is also not a productive investment of my time.

I still plan to be involved in weather reporting since I love monitoring the weather and reporting weather events in my community. I may be slightly less active in severe weather reporting during weekdays for the next few months while I focus on my PhD dissertation, but I will still keep an active monitor on the weather situation around here.

My “Weekly Wrap Up” weather posts on here will not change. I still plan to release those every Saturday in the same format I’ve been releasing them. I’ll still append #ARWX to the end of the post so anyone who does share them on social media can benefit from the #ARWX tagging.

Short-term, any major severe weather updates that occur in my community, I’ll likely post here on my WeatherTogether blog, and I may simply move to this format moving forward. The blog format allows me to provide more context and thought to weather reports I post instead of smaller, less-contextual reports on social media.

For the times I need to provide “real-time” weather reports, I’ve considered setting up a chatroom on a messaging app such as Discord or Signal and invite those who wish to follow my “real-time” weather reports to access it. This way people who would actually benefit from the weather reports could read and access the reports instead of a mass-broadcast to social media that falls on a bunch of deaf ears. I haven’t decided if this would be a useful format to setup, or if I should simply post all severe weather related updates to this blog instead (and share the link to my blog to those interested). Feel free to offer comments, as I would love to hear feedback on this.

Lastly, now that I am a HAM radio operator (N5PKR), I’m trying to use my HAM radio for better use in my community for severe weather events. I’ve received some guidance from one of the major players in EmComm in my community, and I’ll continue to research other areas in this matter.

That wraps it up here! Nathan Parker signing off.