Chennai Rains | TN’s unique community of weather-watchers helps people ride out the storm

As the city gears up for a week of torrential downpour, Tamil Nadu’s lively network of weather bloggers have sprung into action on social media, keeping people updated with chatty forecasts

In the twilight hours of Saturday, as the city faced the highest amount of rainfall since the deluge of 2015, at around 1.30 am, a text message stirred K Srikanth awake. It was the parent of a child scared by the seemingly unending drums of thunder. “They wanted to know when it would stop,” says the veteran weather blogger from Anna Nagar. “At times like these, our job is more than making accurate forecasts — it is to offer empathy, solace, and calm people down.”

As Chennai faces another severe bout of rains — the city has already exceeded its annual rainfall average with more than a month of monsoon left — its weather bloggers have been hard at work, posting regular forecasts on Twitter and Facebook. Accounts like Tamil Nadu Weatherman run by Pradeep John (377.9K followers), Chennai Rains, run by Srikanth and his group (119.6K), Chennai Weather run by Raja Ramasamy (99.9K) have been buzzing with activity — as have other similar accounts with variations of these words (Tamil Nadu, Chennai, rain, monsoon) in their handles.

“I don’t look at weather blogging as just predicting whether it will rain or not, I try to explain why a certain phenomenon happens,” says Srikanth, who studies weather models, cyclone patterns, wind charts and so on using satellite images available in the public domain.