Clinton College Grad Creates Hyper-Local Weather Website

You could call Andrew Desrosiers of Clinton as one “obsessed with weather.” But in a good way.  

Desrosiers, who has been interested in weather since he was in first grade, is today a meteorologist who has created a webpage that displays the current weather for Clinton as well as a four-day forecast with a technical discussion.  There is also a webcam that when clicked activates a time lapse of the weather conditions in Clinton.    

“The webpage is still a work in progress, but I update the forecasts every night and do it for free.  My webpage is http://www.wxextreme.net,” he said.  

Desrosiers is a 2007 graduate of The Morgan School. He earned two degrees from Plymouth State University: a BS in Meteorology in 2011 and a BS in Mathematics in 2012. He is the son of Pam and Richard Desrosiers of Clinton, and brother to Kristen and Katie Desrosiers. He and his girlfriend Jess Kelly met at college.  

Desrosiers said he created the website to accurately forecast weather events for Clinton and Hartford.    

“I am purely updating this website to gain experience in forecasting, and using the skills I learned in my undergraduate education,” he said.  “I feel many people can benefit from a forecast that is made in town.  Most forecasts today are computer generated (statistics based) and are not tuned to specific towns.” 

Patch asked Desrosiers more about his weather website, how it works and how folks can use it:

How did you come up with the idea of the weather website?   I have been searching for a job in Meteorology ever since I graduated.  I have yet to be successful in finding a job, since this job economy has been tough. I decided to create a weather website to continue to use these skills so they would not be forgotten.  The one thing I feared was becoming rusty with my meteorology techniques and skills. This website allows me to practice and use undergraduate work every day.   

How much work went into developing it?   I have spent weeks building and creating the website.  My work on the website is never done, since meteorology is ever changing.  I spend approximately an hour and a half a night after my second shift job forecasting and updating my webpage to reflect the most current forecast.  I built my webpage entirely myself. I learned html myself and have created this website by slowly learning and reading forums online.

What's your ultimate goal for the website?   I have two goals with this webpage:  1)  I want to be able to create an accurate forecast for Clinton and Hartford.  I always get asked:  “What’s the weather going to be like?” so I have created this website so people can go on the website at their leisure to answer that question.  I pride myself in creating an accurate forecast to best prepare and alert people of pending weather.  I have always enjoyed providing forecasts to anyone who asked me, so now anyone has the opportunity to access my weather forecasts through this website.  2)  I hope that by creating a webpage I may entice an employer to hire me.  I am looking for that first step to start a career in Meteorology or anything related.  I had the dream of becoming a meteorologist since the first grade when Dr. Mel Goldstein came into my class at the Joel School.  By creating this website I have gained meteorological experience by forecasting every day.  I just hope that a career may come out of this website one day.     

What are your future career plans?   I am looking for a way to start a career in the Meteorological field.  It has been tough trying to find that first stepping-stone into this career path.  I enjoy creating forecasts, researching, and experiencing weather.  I find meteorology to be one big puzzle to solve.  

How can the community use the website?   The community can use this website to access a four-day forecast specifically tuned to Clinton.  I have created this website so people can go to it to get an up-to-date forecast for Clinton.  I have included recent warnings and alerts to the webpage. These alerts are created on a server and FTP’ed (File Transfer Protocol) to my website.  There is also a current radar loop and webcam of current conditions on the webpage.  This will allow for anyone to see what is going on in Clinton, weather-wise.  Lastly, I have a weather station which uploads current conditions every minute to the webpage.  I am also looking to create case studies of recent storms (Irene, Blizzard 2013) to learn from these storms and enable me to create more accurate forecasts for the future.  These case studies will focus on the weather synoptically (large scale…United States) and mesoscale (small scale…Clinton) to understand the nature of these storms.