Every Nashvillian knows that as soon as the sky starts to turn that eerie greenish hue, it's time to get inside ... and check Twitter. For the past five years, David Drobny and Will Minkoff, the two men behind the @NashSevereWx handle, have reliably delivered the good, bad and weird weather news on Twitter with enthusiasm and hilariously appropriate GIFs. So once the ice finally thawed after this month's record-breaking winter storm, they sat down with the Scene to chat about how they're able to have better information than the bigger media outlets and what they think about all those crybabies who yell at them when their predictions are wrong.
Nashville Severe Weather was the only news outlet to get the recent ice storm predictions right. All other news coverage was predicting 6-10 inches of snow.
WM: One of the first things people need to understand about what we do is that we're not meteorologists. We don't forecast weather on our own. All our information that we put out on Twitter is derivative. We take our cues from the National Weather Service, so if we get it right, it's only because they got us 90 percent of the way there.
DD: We're at a huge advantage versus the local media, because they have all of Middle Tennessee to cover. But we're just two counties, Davidson and Williamson, so the forecast can be very specific. We bring a little bit more of a nuanced, hyperlocal approach, and I think we get an unfair credit for getting stuff right.
That's nice of you to put it that way.
WM: Well, if we get it wrong, and we're able to say, "The [weather] models missed it, blame it on something else," we can't accept the credit when we're right.
DD: We refuse them both [laughs].
Speaking of getting it wrong, I've seen people on Twitter get so mad at you guys when the weather doesn't do what you say it might do.
WM: I don't know what else is going on in their lives that prompts them to get really mad at us. We try to convey to our followers that we are giving them the very best information that we have access to all of the time. Sometimes that information is not accurate, sometimes that information is accurate to a point, beyond that is an educated guess.
DD: I'm glad the people who troll us never make mistakes [laughs].
Read more of this interview on Country Life, our arts and culture blog.
More From the 2015 People Issue
The Textile Designer: Andra Eggleston / The Transformer: Bill Schleicher / The Chief: Steve Anderson / The Bookseller: Yusef Harris / The Producer: Dave Cobb / The Rookie: Filip Forsberg / The Pedal Steel-Playing Pilot: Joshua Motohashi / The Weathermen: David Drobny & Will Minkoff / The Punk Neuroscientist: Kale Edmiston / The Kitchen Artist: Karla Ruiz / The Metalhead: Kayla Phillips / The Image Master: kogonada / The Bartender: Lee Parrish / The Professor: Lisa Guenther / The Advocate: Marisa Richmond / The Captains: Kellie Hurst & Regina Durkan / The Painter: Michael Shane Neal / The Tunesmith: Shane McAnally
