Come this winter, Western Massachusetts residents will find their region’s best-known weather personality on a new platform.
Dave Hayes — “the Weather Nut” to all who read his forecasts — plans to launch a mobile app around early December.
Hayes, a weather enthusiast who built a grassroots audience of thousands on social media over the past 13 years, is the region’s somewhat unofficial weatherman.
His daily, hyper-local forecasts reach 58,000 followers on Facebook and 7,000 on X, formerly Twitter.
The Weather Nut said he will continue using his popular social media accounts after releasing the app.
But this new platform will place the distribution of forecasts more firmly under his control. Whether his posts reach their audience will rely less on social media’s sometimes confounding algorithms.
“When it comes to severe weather in the summer or other more timely weather events, using Facebook as a way to disseminate timely weather information is becoming untenable,” Hayes said Friday. “And I think you’d find other meteorologists who would say it is untenable.”
Heavy rain floods the South End neighborhood of Springfield on Friday, Nov. 12, 2021. (Hoang ‘Leon’ Nguyen / The Republican)
Facebook might notify his followers four hours or even four days after he posts a forecast. By design, the platform does not display posts in chronological order.
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Three in four followers already find his material on their mobile phones.
“Reaching people more reliably about weather information that can help them, reaching them where they’re finding me, is the main impetus” behind the app, Hayes said.
Local Burger in Northampton, Mass., Feb. 28, 2023, after several inches of snow fell overnight. (Will Katcher/MassLive).
The app will display his morning weather report, forecasts, updates and live storm coverage. It will also allow Hayes to send alerts for severe weather. If the local National Weather Service office releases a winter storm warning, for instance, the app will help Hayes quickly push that information out to his constituents.
Other features, including the ability for people to post weather pictures and questions to the app, could follow in later releases.
“I’m not trying to compete with AccuWeather or The Weather Channel or anything like that, because I don’t have the resources like that,” Hayes said. “I’m a one-person DIY operation.”
Rather, he wants to continue giving his audience what they’ve come to expect: a local weather story.
Hayes developed an interest in meteorology growing up watching storm coverage from Bob Copeland and other Boston meteorologists on TV. He gravitated to The Weather Channel in the 1990s, and then to the internet.
In 2011, Hayes began posting his local forecasts online, steadily earning the trust of thousands from Western Massachusetts.
“People were telling me it was helping them and they were enjoying it and they were getting benefit from it,” he told MassLive in 2022. “I wanted to be helpful to people, and when I heard I was helping people around one of my passions it was a no-brainer.”
Hayes said he considered the developing app in recent years and “got serious about it” last year.
He built the app with Northampton-based developer Bruno Trindade and graphic designer Eric Olsson, of Amherst.
