National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office

In July 2012, our office officially joined Twitter. The National Weather Service in Brownsville now has a presence on both Facebook and Twitter. After a little over a year with Facebook, we’ve reached well over 3,000 followers. Most importantly, social media is a two–way street. Your comments and feedback have never been more easy to provide than now, and much of the feedback may be used to help us improve our service to you, our most valued consumer. We look forward to being able to interact with you on both of those social media networks. Here is a little more information about our office’s involvement on Twitter and Facebook.

Please be aware that during times of active weather, we may not be able to directly respond to individual questions or posts as we try to disseminate critical weather information as quickly as possible.

Follow us on Twitter @NWSBrownsville, or click on this link to view our Twitter Page.

Why Tweet?
Twitter has been a bit slower than Facebook to take off across the Rio Grande Valley, but the benefits in receiving and providing true "breaking news" information may be invaluable during critical and potentially life threatening weather situations. Facebook is best used for discussion and educational purposes about short or long term weather and climate conditions, announcements, unusual occurrences, and more. Frequent status updates are not typical Facebook "etiquette". Twitter is best used for rapid–fire information, including storm updates, storm reports, non–routine weather updates, and more. One might say Twitter is text messaging to thousands. In short, Twitter is Informational; Facebook is Conversational.

Our Twitter page will be used to post brief updates or information on area weather. At this time, we are not planning on automating any posts. For an automated feed of some of our weather information, you can follow @iembot_bro, a bot account run by the Iowa Mesonet. We cannot guarantee the timeliness of weather information on this feed. IEM bot is a potential source of information if you would like automated updates for our entire area of responsibility.

Hashtags

We encourage weather tweeters across the Rio Grande Valley to join the conversation using #rgvwx. Our service area covers the Rio Grande Valley, the ranch country of Jim Hogg, Brooks, northern Starr and Hidalgo, and Kenedy (King Ranch), and the waters of Laguna Madre and the Gulf of Mexico out to 60 nautical miles. If you have an automated feed of surface observations, warnings, or other posts, we ask that do NOT use the #rgvwx hashtag. This will make it much easier for us to monitor the hashtag in real time.

Submitting Weather Reports

In order to ensure that we see your weather report, we recommend that you do one of the following. These are listed in order of how quickly we are likely to receive the information.

Remember that location and time are very important to us when we are receiving weather reports. Therefore, you are encouraged to use some method of geotagging (next secion) on your report.

Submitting Storm Reports

If Geotagging is Available:

Some examples of weather report tweets with geotagging:

If Geotagging is NOT Available, or you use web–based twitter.com:

Some examples of weather report tweets without geotagging:

What You Can Report

You can tweet any weather event that occurs in your local area, but we are most interested in significant events: flooding, hail, wind damage, lightning strikes, tornadoes, wildfires, etc. In particular:

You can "Like" our Facebook Page and get updates here.

Our Facebook page will continue to be used to post updates, information, cool facts and discussion points, educational information, and much more, about Rio Grande Valley and other Texas weather, often in photo or video form. The best way to join the conversation is to share brief weather story or share a photo or video to our Facebook wall, or comment on an existing photo, video, or update.

We encourage our Facebook fans and Twitter followers to get involved!. In addition to Weather–At–A–Glance graphics and "blog–casts" (Graphicasts) and multimedia weather briefings, our staff will occasionally post items of interest weather–wise and otherwise, including photos of outreach events, radar snapshots, weather model maps and what they mean. Even the occasional tarantula or snake hanging around the upper air shelter pops up in our photo library! "Liking", commenting on, or sharing a post on Facebook lets us know that you value this content and would like to see more. Similarly on Twitter, sending us a quick reply or message, retweeting us, or "favoriting" one of our tweets will also let us know that you enjoy the content that we are posting.

The National Weather Service is encouraging people to "be a force of nature" as a part of the Weather-Ready Nation campaign.

How does this relate to our presence on social media networks?

Studies show that individuals need to receive messages a number of ways before taking appropriate action. Many people are more likely to act when the messages are received from a trusted source such as a family member, friend, or community leader.

If you see some critical weather information that we are sharing, a good safety tip that we post, or you are actually experiencing severe weather, we encourage you to "be a force of nature" by letting your social network know. Social media like Twitter and Facebook make it very simple and fast to share information.

To read more on the Weather-Ready Nation campaign, visit the national website by clicking here.