Will Minkoff (left) and David Drobny, standing on Snow Force 1.
Nearly 45,000 Nashvillians follow @NashSevereWx on Twitter, and for good reason: If there are storm warnings, these are the guys who will make sure you have all the information you need to stay safe. (And if it's just a calm, warm spring day, they'll post funny jokes and GIFs to keep you entertained until the weather does something interesting again.)
I got to chat with David Drobny and Will Minkoff, the two men behind the city's best weather service, for this week's People Issue, and you can read that portion of the interview here. But I wanted to share a little bit more of our conversation, because it was so great to finally have a chance to meet the men who've kept me calm and informed in the face of many a tornado warning.
What’s your favorite kind of weather?
David Drobny: I like the weather that doesn’t hurt anybody, personally. A lot of people get on people for liking tornadoes. I don’t want to see them, I don’t think anybody does. We both stood in storm debris — mine was a hurricane, [Will's] was the Nashville tornado [of ’98] — you don’t wish that anybody. My favorite kind ... I don’t know. A tornado that doesn’t hurt anybody?
Will Minkoff: The holy grail, I think, for weather nerds is thunder snow. Wouldn’t you say?
D: No, not for me. It would be for [Jim] Cantore. By the way, because I’m a nerd, I tracked him down and met him one time. Nicest dude ever.
I was gonna ask who some of your weather heroes are ...
D: Without a doubt, the Weather Service. They’re anonymous, they’re not on TV...
W: They hardly ever publish their name on their work, which is grossly scientific and very, very difficult work. There are people working in this industry day in, day out, who are unseen. They’re trying to get it right for no other reason than to try and protect life and property. And that’s who we look up to.
What is some of either the scariest or craziest weather that you have personally experienced?
D: I didn’t experience Katrina. But I went to high school on the Mississippi coast and I went to help clean up. That was pretty incredible. They were kind of the forgotten part of that storm and I lived there a long time. People think it was just a New Orleans storm and it wasn’t. And that does something to you, when you stand in a place that you used to live and you don’t just see debris, you remember what it was like and who those people were or are. Something happens to you emotionally — it’s different than seeing it on TV. As far as events, I remember as a little kid, when I lived in Ohio, there was one basement in the neighborhood and when there was a tornado warning everybody ran across the street, and it was kind of a party. There were two kegs down there and two pool tables … that’s what sparked my interest, as a kid.
W: For me it was seeing storm damage in Nashville, from a storm that was barely a tornado. It wasn’t overwhelming, but just happened to hit the wrong place, and seeing the devastation ... that’s always something that’s in the back of my head when we do this.
This winter was so gnarly, does that say anything about what this tornado season coming up could be like? Does that mean it’ll be more intense?
W: No.
D: Certainly not the causation and almost certainly not correlation. We used to get questions like that a lot — “Oh, well it got foggy so many days in September, that means we’ll have this many number of snowy days.” I was actually at the supermarket and picked up a copy of the farmer’s almanac and I laughed at it [laughs].
W: Another winter weather misnomer, I saw it recently on Twitter, where because it’s been so cold and the ground has been frozen for so long, that means we won’t have as big a mosquito problem in the spring. This question was raised to a local TV meteorologist who we’re chummy with and he said “Well if that was the case there would be no mosquitoes in the tundra of Canada, but in fact there are mosquitoes the size of Volkswagens up there." There are a lot of wives tales about the weather that people like to ask us about, but most of it is not true.
