Frankie MacDonald, YouTube weather whiz, warns Portland of ‘major winter storm'
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – YouTube weather whiz Frankie MacDonald took to his channel to warn Portland that a 'major winter storm' could be coming to the city on Thursday.
MacDonald, an amateur meteorologist from Nova Scotia with more than 304,000 subscribers, has grown a cult following online — as seen on the — for his enthusiastic weather forecasts under the handle .
Winter Weather Timeline: Snow, ice on the way, start preparing now
In January 2024, an '' blanketed the greater Portland metro area in a sheet of ice that took days to melt. Ahead of the storm, that the region could see 'a lot of snow' with 'dangerous and treacherous driving conditions,' and his forecast turned out to be shockingly accurate.
His forecast was posted on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024, and by the end of the weekend, snow and freezing rain covered Multnomah County in nearly 2 inches of ice that led to downed power lines, mass outages, and .
Now MacDonald has another prediction for Portland, this time for the city's first winter storm of 2025. According to a , residents in the region can expect a 'major winter storm' on Thursday.
'People in Portland, Oregon, be safe. Have your winter boots, winter jackets, hats, gloves, scarves and ski pants Ready and order your pizzas and Chinese food,' MacDonald said in the video. 'Buy cases of Pepsi and Coke. Do your grocery shopping. Don't wait until the last minute; do it right now.'
PHOTOS: North Medford school gym roof collapses under 350 tons of snow
Meanwhile, that temperatures in the Portland area will struggle to get above freezing as the region faces snow and freezing rain. It's not yet clear when the precipitation will begin, nor how many inches the region should expect.
As for MacDonald's prediction, Meteorologist Steve Pierce says it's best to take amateur forecasts with a grain of salt.
'Although amateur social media forecasts can be entertaining, folks should always get their forecasts from trusted experts,' Pierce said. 'The KOIN 6 weather team has been on top of this developing storm and has the latest updates from trusted model data, which is interpreted by the area's most accurate weather team.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
WIRED
10 hours ago
- WIRED
The Viral Storm Streamers Predicting Deadly Tornadoes—Sometimes Faster Than the Government
Jun 11, 2025 7:30 AM Storm streamers are using radars and AI robots to predict extreme weather for millions of YouTube subscribers, in some cases faster than the National Weather Service, which has been gutted by DOGE. A large tornado moves down a highway in Texas. Photograph:At 10:44 pm eastern time on May 16, Ryan Hall spotted a blue square on his radar indicating debris flying into the air and realized a huge tornado was racing toward Somerset, Kentucky. 'We've been watching this storm for a while, we've been hootin' and hollerin' for a while, hopefully the message has gotten out there and we know to be in our safe spots,' Hall warned his YouTube audience in a calm voice with a Southern twang. A silver robot with blue eyes popped onto the screen to tell Hall that a viewer had commented about tiny houses near the tornado. 'Oh really?' Hall replied to his AI robot, known as Y'all Bot. The 31-year-old host of Ryan Hall, Y'all—one of YouTube's most popular weather channels with 2.8 million subscribers—went live for nearly 12 hours that day as more than 70 tornadoes swept through the central U.S., killing at least 28 people. Nineteen of the dead were in Kentucky. Hall, too, was under tornado warning as he streamed from his home in Kentucky. Sirens went off in Somerset, but the National Weather Service lagged behind in upgrading its tornado warning, Hall told viewers. He also said that recent cuts had left the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky short staffed. 'We're about to have a large tornado go through a very populated area with much less warning than what there should be, as a result of that,' he said. It wasn't until 10:57 pm that the NWS finally upgraded its tornado warning for Somerset. Hall doesn't have a meteorology degree, but employs meteorologists like 27-year-old Andy Hill, who frequently appears on his livestream. Hill was on vacation during the deadly tornadoes, but noted that Hall had correctly read the radar. 'He was just looking at, essentially patterns and radar data, which is what I've attempted to teach him over the years,' Hill said. 'On May 16, I think Ryan definitely saved some lives.' A new generation of storm forecasters are going live on YouTube for hours during severe weather events, offering real-time updates to millions of subscribers through a network of storm chasers, and even using AI. Their devoted fans help shape the forecast by sending on-the-ground photos of these storms, for example lemon-sized hail, for the streamers to show live on their screens. As the Trump administration slashes federal weather forecasting staff and climate change supercharges storms, their reports are not only entertaining, but crucial and potentially life-saving. This form of weather content is growing rapidly, but so far there are two main YouTube weather forecasters. Hall, who employs about 40 people across his media business and non-profit, and YouTube's second biggest weather streamer, Max Velocity, are game changers who frequently warn their millions of fans about tornadoes on the ground before the NWS issues official alerts. They do this by interpreting blobs of color on the radar and hosting feeds of storm chasers going live from their vehicles. Hall's AI bot interacts with him during storms and it even has its own channel where it goes live 24/7. At the same time that storm streamers, who are funded via ads on YouTube and merch sales, are booming, the primary source they rely on is in chaos. The Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have gutted staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service, meaning less accurate forecasts from all meteorologists. The NWS, which was already understaffed, has lost 600 employees since January; in June, the NOAA announced it would rehire 100 NWS workers. And as yet another above-normal hurricane season begins, the new generation of storm streamers is careful to avoid the subject of climate change when talking to their audiences in deep red states — to avoid alienating viewers who don't believe in it. AI Weather Bot Y'all Bot lives on a server in Hall's Weather House in Kentucky, a large home that is decked out with a studio, edit suites and tornado shelter. When Y'all Bot launched last year, its first job was to interact with Hall on the livestream, helping to fill dead air. Y'all Bot was buggy at first but learned the ropes quickly. Now, it has its own channel separate from Hall's with more than 800,000 subscribers where it goes live 365 days a year, regurgitating NWS warnings and interacting with viewers. Viewers post in the chat asking the bot to tell them the weather in their area, and it reads them the latest forecast. However, it hasn't learned how to read radar imagery yet, Hill said, and would likely never be able to do that independent of human supervision. 'It's going through all the text-based information that it has access to and relaying it in a continuous format,' Hill said. 'Humans have to sleep, we can't always be there.' 'It is 100% independent, running itself,' said Caleb Beacham, a 22-year-old storm chaser who worked for Hall before leaving in early June. 'It has learned how to forecast weather all on its own through AI and computer learning.' 'We're seeing exponential growth on that channel,' Beacham said. He's aware of the backlash to AI but said their audience loves the little bot. 'We're trying to embrace it and incorporate it into that life-saving information.' Competition Heating Up Meanwhile, 22-year-old Max Schuster, who goes by Max Velocity, live streams tornado and hurricane forecasts from his dorm room in Florida. His more than one million YouTube subscribers are familiar with his cat Cheese Curd, who often walks across his desk, seeking attention. 'I'll usually pick her up at some point during the stream, and show everybody,' he tells WIRED. His operation is bare bones compared to Hall. Behind him is a neon sign in the shape of a storm cloud with a lightning bolt. He uses one camera, five monitors, a couple lights and simple software that instantly broadcasts new NWS alerts onto his livestreams. He recently graduated with a meteorology degree and is moving out of his dorm this summer into a larger studio space. As traditional media shrinks, storm streamers are growing; Schuster recently hired his first full-time employee—Reilly Dibble, who used to work for Hall. Unlike a traditional broadcast, YouTube allows Schuster to go live before there's a tornado warning, so he can warn viewers if a storm is likely to produce a tornado. When Hurricane Milton hit Florida last year, causing a tornado outbreak, Schuster said he heard from a viewer that his livestream prompted their family members to seek shelter. 'Our weather coverage is actually saving lives,' he said. Schuster expects the storm streaming world to get more crowded. He notes that competition has recently heated up between them. 'It's bound to happen, but he wanted to make this more of a competition on YouTube,' he says. 'We're definitely not as close as I thought we were.' National Weather Service Cuts Traditional forecasters, storm streamers, and even Y'all Bot rely heavily on the National Weather Service; the agency is a primary source that runs radar sites, launches weather balloons and flies planes into hurricanes. Cuts across the National Weather Service are making storm streamers nervous. The NWS weather balloon launches collect valuable information on temperature, humidity, pressure and winds. 'Because there's been a lack of balloon launches, the data that's getting fed into these models just haven't been as good as they could have been,' Beacham said. Fewer planes flying into hurricanes will mean less accurate forecasts of where hurricanes will make landfall, Schuster said. Jana Houser, a storm chaser and meteorology professor at Ohio State University, says the understaffing at the National Weather Service office in Jackson, Kentucky during deadly tornadoes was 'a small glimpse of what's to come. ' 'The office did as good of a job as they could have possibly done, but they didn't have the resources that they could have possibly had in a different climate,' Houser says. 'Unless we get full staffing in, there are going to be tired forecasters. There are going to be overworked people. There are going to be missed tornadoes.' Houser said streamers like Hall are providing a public service. 'He is helping to inform the general public, which is a service, especially under the context of a poorly-funded and resource-starved National Weather Service.' But she adds that storm streamers can misread the radar and raise the alarm about a cloud formation that is not capable of producing a tornado. This is problematic if there's conflicting information between a streamer and the National Weather Service. 'It can create a sense of distrust or confusion,' she said. Hill said his team is 'immensely careful' but it's impossible to perfectly forecast tornadoes, and they do make mistakes. Calling tornadoes before the National Weather Service means they have a higher false alarm rate than the federal agency, Hill said. 'There's a lot of layers there to justify before [the NWS] sends out a warning. So their false alarm rate is going to be much lower than ours,' Hill said. Climate Change Conundrum Hurricanes are becoming more frequent as global heating cooks the planet, but you wouldn't know it by watching the storm streamers. They know the climate is changing, but many of their viewers live in red states, so they avoid the subject. President Donald Trump has consistently downplayed climate change; during the 2024 election he called it 'a big hoax.' Yale's 2024 Climate Opinion Map that measures perceptions about climate change across the U.S. found that a majority of people in hurricane-prone states like Florida, Texas and Louisiana, and states in tornado alley, believe global warming is happening. But a sizable percentage of people in those states, around 30 percent, don't believe it's caused by human activities. Schuster, whose fans are mostly based in the hurricane and tornado zones of Texas, Illinois and Florida, believes climate change is happening. 'If you deny it, I don't know what to tell you—there's a lot of scientific evidence,' he says 'My opinion is not based off politics or anything like that,' he continues. 'It's based off of what I've been seeing data-wise, within the scientific field of meteorology.' But he doesn't talk about it on his channel. 'If I bring up climate change or something else, it'll probably end up being politicized.' Hill, meanwhile, takes a more nuanced approach; he doesn't directly reference climate change, but he attempts to educate viewers about climatology, hoping they will become more open to believing in climate change. 'As a climatologist, that's the smartest way to handle it,' Hill says. 'Because if I were to be direct with it, we would just lose 40 percent of our audience immediately.' He knows he's walking a tricky line. 'I don't think many people would be super happy about that, especially activists,' he says. But he argues that his approach is more likely to make climate skeptics curious instead of defensive. 'Especially in those deep red states, there's plenty of people who are still on the fence,' he says. 'It's going to be a long term thing but it's going to be something I work on my whole life,' Hill says. In the immediate future, the storm streamers are facing a busy hurricane season this year, and their audiences will likely continue to grow. Beacham predicted that people will soon create AI bots that can read radar and livestream personalized weather forecasts. And he expects more people will launch storm forecasting channels. 'We're going to see a lot more people start to do what Ryan and Max are doing,' he says. 'They've proven that it's possible.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Elevated fire danger in Oregon amid thunderstorm and wind threat
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Parts of Oregon will see elevated wildfire danger today as thunderstorms and gusty winds develop this afternoon. The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning through 8 p.m. Tuesday for wind and low relative humidity in Washington's Kittitas Valley and Lower Columbia Basin of Washington. The Columbia River Gorge will see winds gusting up to 30 mph with relative humidity as low as 10 percent in the region. Due to the abundant dry fuels, any fires that start may spread rapidly. Scattered thunderstorms are also expected to develop throughout the hotter afternoon hours, both Tuesday and Wednesday, around central and southeastern Oregon. While some storms may bring heavy downpours, dry lightning will bring the risk of new wildfire starts. Temperatures remain hot through Wednesday with high temps in the 80s and 90s, further drying out burn fuels in the region. A cooler pattern arrives later in the week. However, little to no rainfall is likely across much of the state for at least the next week. Folks are urged to use extreme caution and avoid outdoor burning, especially during Red Flag Warnings and other fire alerts. Stay with the KOIN 6 Weather Team for your forecast and fire weather updates throughout fire season. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Texas Station Damaged by Winds Gusting Over 80MPH
KTXS in Abilene, Texas was damaged by winds gusting over 80 MPH on Sunday evening. The ABC affiliate said no one was hurt during what it initially called a tornado. It also said it's switching over to YouTube to deliver its newscasts. Meteorologist Caiden Dinkins said The NWS came out to survey the area and, 'things are leaning towards very strong straight-line winds.' At approximately 11 p.m. on June 8 during a severe weather event, a tornado struck the KTXS facility, causing significant damage, destroying our tower and impacting much of the building. We are thankful there were no injuries at the station. Our team is working quickly to assess the damage and find a solution to bring KTXS back on air as soon as possible. KTXS The station said the winds blew the KTXS STL tower from the back of the building to the front lawn. It also said the winds caved in the garage and the roof of the studio was blown away. 'You don't ever expect to experience something like that,' said Dinkins. 'The power went out in the studio and the whole entire station and we were walking back into the studio. You just feel this, almost, suction kind of taking you with these winds as this roof is pulling off. My ears popped, I felt like I was gravitating towards that area that was opening and me and Mark just, all we could do was take cover and hope for the best.'
