Since the blizzard of 2012 Owen and I have had a huge passion for weather and had been looking for ways to share that passion with our friends, family, and neighbors!
We began answering the ever-popular "will we have a snow day tomorrow?" question for our friends and classmates in Middle/High School during the winter of 2017. As you might imagine this was quite a big hit and we had very good success rates with this. That summer we really became fascinated with severe weather as well.
Over the coming years, we continued exploring this passion and sharing snow day predictions with those around us. In 2019 we really got serious about expanding our reach and on July 31st 2019 West Michigan Weather was officially founded and we created our discord server, twitter account, and Facebook page.
2020 was a crazy year for us both with winter featuring several area-wide snow days and several significant severe weather events that summer (06/10, 08/10, 08/28-29).
The events of the summer of 2020 led us to expand our organization even further and start formal storm-chasing operations, a brand new logo, severe weather forecast discussions, and our own personal predictions on where severe weather hazards would be most prevalent. We have since stopped issuing our own outlook graphics (because we want only provide official NWS outlooks for the public awareness process) but we had extreme success with them.
The following winter we re-developed our snow day predictions into what we call "School Closing Outlooks" and started posting them online to make them accessible to our followers across the West Michigan area!
We also added some fun snowflakes to our new and improved logo to give a nod to the crazy Michigan winters we often have and winter 2020-2021 was certainly no different and led to our first "Snow Chase."
We continued our school closing predictions and storm-chasing ops with extreme success from 2020 to 2024 going through several renditions and growth in the community.
In January of 2024 we created a new set of logos to better represent the West Michigan area!
These are the logos we still use today! This summer has been absolutely crazy for us in terms of community growth and we now serve 22,000+ square miles and 10,000+ followers in West Michigan and beyond!
To celebrate our 5 year anniversary and to help support West Michigan Weather use code "WMIWX5" in our merchandise store through August 31! Click here!
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