Jordan Tessler, a junior geography major, says he was born with a love of weather. He feeds students a steady stream of forecasts through the project TerpWeather on Twitter and Facebook.
Senior geography major Jordan Tessler runs TerpWeather, a Facebook page and Twitter account that he uses to inform the university and College Park community of upcoming weather events.
The Diamondback caught up with Tessler Mondayafternoon to learn about how he tracks winter storms and events.
THE DIAMONDBACK: What is your general forecast for the upcoming few days?
JORDAN TESSLER: For this storm particularly, I’ve been one of those people who are pretty conservative about it just because it’s kind of sneaked up on us from behind just because everyone was so focused on the other storm.
I’m thinking some forecasters are too aggressive, so I’m going with 2-4 inches just in the morning. It could be intense at times, the way things look. There’s always the chance that it might fluctuate a little bit and that’s why I do what’s called nowcasting, which is real-time forecasting, inundating your Twitter feed with updates.
THE DIAMONDBACK: What are the challenges in predicting the behavior of a storm?
TESSLER: In these early-season situations, it’s always temperature that matters the most. If you’re not freezing, you’re not getting as much snow as you could be. People put out snow maps and will read the models at a winter ratio. That’s assuming the standard 10-1 ratio, but in early-season storms, you might get an 8-1, 6-1. It’s calculating that ratio and factoring in what everything else in the atmosphere is going to do.
With our previous storm, the biggest variable was how long the cold air held on against an assault of warm air from a different storm. It’s how long the air masses behave. You can’t really nail that down until just outside of the event.
THE DIAMONDBACK: How do you form your predictions?
TESSLER: It’s kind of an aggregation technique. I look at what the models say — that’s what all forecasters do.
I prefer the European model. It has a reputation as being really good, but I don’t discount any of the others just because they’re all model solutions. I also have contacts with meteorologists and we’ll bounce ideas off of each other. I go with my gut sometimes.
THE DIAMONDBACK: How often do you check the weather?
TESSLER: If I know a storm is coming, I’ll check it usually twice a day when you’re talking about a storm that’s seven, eight days in advance just to check up on it and make sure it’s still there. When there’s big storms coming in, it’s once every six hours. And when it’s real-time, it’s every couple of minutes.
THE DIAMONDBACK: How can other students get involved with tracking storms?
TESSLER: There’s plenty of free resources. A lot of the modeling is available online. You can use NOAA’s website itself, even though it’s a convoluted mess. There are subscription-based resources — I have a couple of them. And then there are the free radars — the Weather Channel has its own radar, Accuweather has its own radar.
