Lowell — Forty degrees and rainy? Eighty degrees and sunny? Conditions just right for tornadoes? In the mitten state, those scenarios can happen all in a day’s time, and Michigan Storm Chasers chief meteorologist Joel Fritsma has to be ready for whatever the atmosphere doles out.
When it comes to livestream weather reporting, the MSC team stays prepared to cover all 83 Michigan counties at any time of day. Fritsma recently demonstrated his responsiveness during a virtual interview with SNN. A severe weather alert popped up on his screen, indicating thunderstorms and quarter-sized hail were on its way to portions of the Upper Peninsula.
Fritsma was about to cut the interview short when MSC founder and President Ryan Harriott jumped online to go live with the report on Facebook and other platforms. The weather doesn’t wait.
“We were scrambling there for a second,” Fritsma said with a laugh.
‘My personal goal in becoming a meteorologist growing up was that I always wanted to keep people safe somehow.’
— meteorologist Joel Fritsma
Fritsma, a 2018 Lowell High School graduate, has been watching the skies for as long as he can remember. He was known at LAS for his passion for weather, as reported by School News Network in 2017, when he delivered the daily forecast for the Red Arrow Report.
“I always shout out to my first-grade teacher at Alto Elementary, Mrs. (Marilyn) Hughes. She had a weather person of the day (assigned) in her class. … She noticed I was spending a lot of time looking out the window at the clouds and not paying attention.”
Hughes, now retired, asked Fritsma to take over the job every other week, and he loved it.
“That’s really when I got hooked. I was like, ‘this is something I really want to do some day.’”
He found ways to continue learning about meteorology until high school, when he joined the Red Arrow Report team, delivering the daily forecast for his peers.
“Throughout my academia, people were always like, ‘I can’t wait to see you on the news someday. I was like, ‘You know what? I am going to do it! I’m going to stick to my dream,'” he said.
But deeper than that, he always had a bigger mission.
“My personal goal in becoming a meteorologist growing up was that I always wanted to keep people safe somehow.”
Live Weather via Facebook
After graduating from Lowell High School, Joel attended Grand Rapids Community College before heading to Central Michigan University to pursue majors in meteorology and geographic information systems with a minor in math. He graduated in December and joined the MSC team right away as chief meteorologist. He had been at the forefront of starting MSC, planning it with Harriott and other weather enthusiasts over the past few years.
The social media-based company now has more than 450,000 followers on Facebook, more than 8,000 on X, 7,600 on Instagram and more than 60,000 subscribers on YouTube. They are also on Twitch.tv.
The team works completely remote, with staff members all over the state.
Fritsma, who recently moved back to Lowell from Mount Pleasant, normally begins his workday at 7 a.m., releasing a daily conditions page with maps of temperatures across the state and projected conditions.
He makes forecast posts as needed on severe weather such as thunderstorms, hail, flash floods and tornadoes, and joins the team in video briefings for severe weather events.
Much of the work is regular forecasting, and the team makes it fun with creative images.
“We try to make forecasting fun as well, so we put out these little forecast graphics that might have Michigan-based themes to it. The Muggy Meter might say ‘bathing in Vernors’ or something like that.”
So, what about storm chasing?
Fritsma does that too. He started following storms at age 15. In a field southeast of Lowell, he would capture footage on his phone, venturing farther as he gained experience.
Now, when a storm pops up nearby, he loads his equipment into his 2007 GMC Envoy and heads toward it. He uses a couple GoPro cameras, a laptop with radar software and a 5G mobile hotspot. He tops his vehicle with amber lights for visibility.
While he’s yet to see a twister in Michigan, he said one exciting experience was seeing tornadoes in Indiana morph from cone to wedge to segmented shapes.
The team is game for chasing storms of all kinds, though.
“We just go out and put ourselves in the best situation to see all severe weather hazards. … Usually we position ourselves away from where the storm is going to head. We want to be south of the storm or behind it, so we are not getting ourselves in those danger situations. At the end of the day, a human life is more important than getting that shot.”
The goal in storm chasing isn’t thrill seeking, but to make people more aware of the threat Mother Nature poses and take it seriously, he said.
“We want to turn an inactive mindset into a reactive mindset. In this day and age, when everyone tunes out all the alerts in the world, it’s best to have that live cam (footage) so people can say, ‘Hey, that’s close to me I should be taking shelter now.’”
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