Fifteen Years in, Nashville Severe Weather Marches On | Cover Story

Just after midnight on April 3, Nashville Severe Weather signed on to begin a livestream covering tornado warnings in Davidson and Williamson counties. 

Seven hours and two minutes later — and after 16 tornado warnings — they signed off. 

“I guess the sun is coming up,” NSWX founder David Drobny said roughly six hours and 50 minutes into the stream. 

Many Middle Tennesseans stayed up with the self-described “tweeteorologists”/”media-orologists” — a peak of 511,000 viewers at one point — listening to the steady refrain, “It is not safe to go to sleep yet.” More than a half-million viewers was a new record for the 2010-founded platform. 

The top comment on the stream reads: “Guys, so supportive of your work last night — I know many of us were up and listening through most of it. We’re tired and we didn’t even do all the work! So glad y’all do what you do. THANKS.” 

Another commenter adds: “This was such a help to have. My younger brother was south of me and I was able to wake him up and get him into shelter cause of this stream. The weather was crazy in Bellevue.” 

Yet another: “Amazing work, thankful for you. I took my dogs and cats to the basement twice in the wee early AM and was glad to have you there with me.”

And another: “Let’s gooo no school.” 

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For the uninitiated — and there are fewer and fewer of those with each Nashville-area severe weather event — Nashville Severe Weather is a local weather service run by weather hobbyists, covering only Davidson County and Williamson County. The group sends daily forecast newsletters (and memes) thanks to a robust intern program, and streams and sends live updates on social media during severe weather events. 

Through Patreon pledges, the service is self-sustaining. The money pays for radar equipment, weather software and generators to keep the stream going in case of power loss — but it’s certainly not enough money for Nashville Severe Weather’s small team to quit their day jobs. So yes, after that all-nighter, they had to go to work. 

The model and volunteer strategy was created by Drobny, a local lawyer who obtained radar software in 2009 and became the de facto “weather guy” among his friends. He soon got tired of texting weather updates and instead began updating people via Twitter. Then he fought to get on the inside — a proprietary chat with the National Weather Service to get professional-level data in exchange for updates from the community. It was something usually reserved for media and emergency services. More on that later. 

But in June of this year, Drobny decided to leave the “weather guy” work. 

“I’m emotionally and mentally exhausted from 15 years of running NSWX from the margins of my free time,” he wrote in an open letter to Nashville Severe Weather supporters.  

From the outside, things will remain largely the same with Nashville Severe Weather’s remaining team members. Those include Will Minkoff, a software developer by day who’s been with the group since 2011. A 1998 tornado that tore through East Nashville spawned his interest in weather as a teen. He spent some of his high school service hours helping with cleanup. 

Like Drobny, Minkoff became the “weather person” in his friend group. Drobny caught wind of Minkoff’s efforts — sorry for the pun — and invited him to lunch.

“The rest is history,” Minkoff tells the Scene. 

The pair soon became a two-headed monster, pledging to never miss a storm. 

Like Minkoff, Andrew Leeper developed his interest in weather following the ’98 tornado. Leeper joined the Nashville Severe Weather team in 2015 and serves as the sort of play-by-play commentator to Minkoff’s color commentary. In college, Leeper was the weather anchor on the campus TV station, but his school didn’t have a meteorology program. He ultimately entered into ministry full time, and he now serves as the worship minister at Brentwood Hills Church of Christ. 

It was Leeper who brought the organization into the streaming age in 2017. 

“It was the perfect creative outlet that I’ve been looking for that didn’t exist back when I was in college,” Leeper tells the Scene. “It was really a perfect connection, where I can have a full-time job outside of weather and still be involved.” 

Nashville Severe Weather was all amateurs and “weather nerds” (their term) until meteorologist Tom Johnstone joined the team earlier this year — just a few months after his retirement following 33 years with the National Weather Service. 

As it happens, Johnstone was the one who made sure Drobny and his team got access to the National Weather Service messaging system back in 2011 — but not before rejecting Drobny at least once. It wasn’t standard practice to allow amateur weather forecasters into the fold, but Johnstone kept his eye on Drobny. 

Several months after their first correspondence, there was a flash flood in Cool Springs. 

“On the Nashville Severe Weather page, there were pictures of that flood happening,” Johnstone says. “And we didn’t have any idea at the National Weather Service that it was ongoing. We didn’t get a call until 30 minutes later.” 

According to the Nashville Severe Weather account, it was precisely 38 minutes later. 

But at the time, something clicked for Johnstone.  

“Social science has taught us and experience has taught us people need more than just a warning to take action,” he says. “They need some kind of confirmation. So a report or a picture or a video really goes a long way in getting people to take a warning seriously.

“Our mission in the National Weather Service is to protect lives and property,” he continues, “and if we were not using this kind of information, this kind of partnership, we wouldn’t be able to do our jobs as well.”  

For about a decade, Johnstone moved away from Nashville to work for the National Weather Service in other markets. But before that, he brought Drobny along as a shadow. Drobny attended training events, media workshops, meetings with emergency responders and ride-alongs to assess storm damage. The National Weather Service has a program for training amateur storm spotters who can then report back to the organization — but according to Johnstone, Drobny and Nashville Severe Weather were much more reliable and consistent than your average amateur.

In 2016, Nashville Severe Weather was awarded the Walter J. Bennett Public Service Award from the National Weather Service.

“I remember standing at the podium and saying, ‘For years, I’ve been standing on the outside of the weather enterprise looking in, and this award marks, for me, inclusion into that community — that now I’m on the inside,’” Minkoff says. “That’s nice to see.”

Having been on both sides of the coin, Johnstone thinks the relationship between meteorologists and weather hobbyists like Nashville Severe is complementary. They’re each interpreting the same National Weather Service information. And TV stations do a wider overview, whereas NSWX gets more granular — drilling down into hyper-local weather-nerd territory.

What Nashville Severe Weather can’t do — as they often have to clarify — is let viewers know if school, their concert or their sporting event is canceled. 

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“We don’t beef with meteorologists,” Minkoff says. “If they do something stupid, we’ll say it’s stupid. If they make a dumb call or scare people, we’ll call that out.”

Many Nashville-area residents look to Nashville Severe Weather — whether it’s via their YouTube livestreams, the timeline they update on nashvillesevereweather.com or posts on one of their social media accounts — to help soothe anxiety. The NSWX team’s tone becomes more urgent when the situation does, but they won’t be jumping up and down or yelling or using the term “code red.” The livestreams feature a constant flow of simple, digestible information that creates a calming cadence for viewers.  

“We’re just not about the hype,” Minkoff says.

Weather is, of course, very boring a lot of the time. But it often doesn’t feel that way to Nashvillians — many of whom live through flash floods, tornadoes and other severe weather events on a yearly basis. 

“The first thing is just acknowledging that, hey, you’re not weird or strange because you have storm anxiety,” Leeper says. “It’s a common thing, and a lot of people here struggle with it. I think one reason we struggle with it is we’ve been through some really devastating weather events here. We’ve seen it all, we’ve seen devastating floods, we’ve seen tornadoes that take lives in our city. We’ve seen some pretty rough stuff.” 

“Everybody in Nashville knows someone that was affected by the tornadoes in 2020,” Johnstone adds. “So that makes it a little more personal. And that personalization, I think, can feed back into anxiety. ”  

It has always been personal for Drobny, who has been known to call acquaintances to check in following severe weather events in their neighborhood. While the service the group provides soothes anxiety for many Nashvillians, it ultimately worsened Drobny’s anxiety — especially following several consecutive severe weather events in 2020. A page on the Nashville Severe Weather site pays tribute to Mike Dolfini and Albree Sexton, who were killed during the March 2020 tornado that wrought havoc throughout Nashville.

“I’ve run out of emotional fuel and mental energy to keep this pace going, especially since the 2020 tornado that killed Mike and Albree, then the derecho, then Waverly,” Dobry wrote in his June exit letter. “It all worked in me a trauma, which caused hypervigilance, which caused burnout.”

Members of Nashville Severe Weather have brought coverage of severe weather events to their audience while on planes, on vacation, on work trips, in the middle of the night, and through sickness. With the core three team members — plus Graham Whitford managing the group’s Instagram account, intern Elan Segadi producing their newsletters and Luke Myszka managing the website — the organization has a deep enough bench that they don’t have to be on call while on vacation. And that’s something that wasn’t true in the early days. 

“If you say you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and you can’t take your eyes off it until the threat is over,” Minkoff says. 

Still, the biggest challenge is balancing Nashville Severe Weather duties with family time. 

“You were, you are, and you will remain: well loved by these NSWX strangers,” Dobry wrote in his farewell letter. “Please be nice to them. They work hard. Their families sacrifice a piece of themselves to run this. You are worth it.” 

For Minkoff, knowing he’s helping others stay safe is enough to stave off burnout, even after 13 years doing the work. It’s not uncommon for the team to be recognized in public — some viewers recognize the faces they’ve seen in NSWX’s tiny box on the bottom right of the streaming screen. 

Nashville Severe Weather thinks it’s important to meet the real people behind the follower count. During their livestreams, after all, the team members are each sitting alone, talking to a webcam. 

“We love engaging with the public,” Minkoff says. “I love it when people share their stories about how we help them, because it’s motivating for us to know that that message is getting through.” 

Significant weather events have been happening more than ever before in Nashville, east of what was historically known as “Tornado Alley.”  There’s also more awareness, as coverage of such events is more robust than in the past, thanks to the NSWX service and improved radar tools.

But Nashville Severe Weather focuses on the weather — a cup of water compared to the proverbial ocean of global climate. 

Johnstone has expertise in climate — he studied it at The Ohio State University. While there isn’t good data on tornado frequency before 1950, the regions hit hardest by cyclones have shifted in the past 20 or so years, he says. They used to largely occupy the Southern Midwest (Oklahoma and Texas) and have moved into the Mid-South to areas surrounding population centers like Birmingham, Ala.; Louisville, Ky.; St. Louis, Mo.; Little Rock, Ark.; and, of course, Nashville. Johnstone says the shift can’t necessarily be attributed to global warming, however, since it’s difficult to parse trends with so little data history.

“If we have a tornado or a flash flood, that’s weather,” Johnstone says. “Climate can affect the odds of something happening. But climate happens on a different temporal scale, a timescale different than weather. They get conflated a lot.”

Having worked at eight different offices during his National Weather Service tenure, Johnstone says he’d never seen the community embrace a weather service the way Nashville has with NSWX. What’s more, very few cities have such a service to embrace. 

“The first time that I went on live with Nash Severe back in April, our phones were blowing up,” Johnstone says. “I didn’t have an appreciation for how many people followed the live coverage. It is tens of thousands of people watching. I was at an event last night and people recognized me, and I didn’t expect that.”

 

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Drobny declined to be interviewed for this story. (Fair enough. In his farewell letter, he asked that people no longer ask him about weather — it would be pretty difficult to write this story without doing so.) Each of the NSWX team members says they’ll be less funny without him. And they say they’ll still use the silly terms he created for weather patterns: “Warm Nose Ned,” “Dry Air Monster” and “Crazy Ivan.”  (The last is when a storm moves east to west.) They’re considering a “What Would David Do?” T-shirt for the merch shop. 

“I miss him every day, but I need him to make a decision that’s the best decision for my friend David and his family, not what’s the best decision for Nashville Severe Weather,” Minkoff says. “David is a world-class hazard communicator, and his voice will be missed, but I think we’ll be able to carry that torch.” 

Whether he knew it or not, Drobny was a visionary too. In a time before tweeting was quite so common, he reached people online, and he evolved with the times. Now the service he created is a key part of Nashville’s media and emergency services landscapes. 

“It’s not all weather radio anymore,” Leeper says. “It’s not all TV weather anymore. It’s branched out into social media. Somebody’s got to be there. If people are going to go get their weather there, somebody needs to be there that’s giving reliable information. If it’s not us, it has to be somebody else, because that’s where people are. So we feel a burden to provide something that’s useful and reliable.” 

For the Nashville Severe Weather team, it’s a service project and a chance to nerd out with fellow weather-heads. They do it for the love of the game. But for the city, it’s a resource that saves lives. 

“Did not expect to cry reading that,” reads one comment on Drobny’s farewell post. “Our family lost our home in 2020 and, ‘East Nashville, get to your safe space’ could be the most important words of our lives. Thank you. A million thank yous. And long live Nashville Severe Weather.”