On Tuesday, Jan. 13, Swissvale resident Josh Miser sat poring over future weather models. As the go-to “weather guy” for his friends and family, this wasn’t an unusual task for Miser. What he found on the Global Forecast System model certainly was.
“It was hinting in a ridiculous way. It was saying we’d get 53 inches of snow [in 24 hours], which is obscene,” said Miser.
Knowing such a titanic storm was exceedingly unlikely, Miser still couldn’t help but wonder what the Steel City would look like, should such a deluge transpire. So, he opened the social media platform Reddit, went to the subforum /r/pittsburgh, and posted an image of the forecast, under his username /u/StormFreak. He hoped to hypothesize with our city’s online community about how roofs would fare, share memories of the blizzards of 1993 and 2010, and joke about making a Giant Eagle run before everyone else got the word.
What Miser didn’t expect was to wake up the next day and see his post shared by local media outlets. Not intending to scare anyone, he hoped Pittsburghers would not read too much into his post. But as Jan. 25 neared, he started looking more and more like Nostradamus.
Miser’s original snowstorm prediction Reddit thread from January of this year.
“When we got closer to the event and there actually was a storm, people were like, ‘Hey, this guy talked about this two weeks ago and now we’re actually having a snowstorm,’” says Miser.
Pittsburgh ultimately got 11 inches of snow, but that didn’t matter. StormFreak had made his mark. And as the views and comments on his posts grew, the /u/StormFreak persona gave Miser a remarkable way to express his interests in a way that other people enjoyed and benefited from, providing a sense of fulfillment far beyond what he could get from his day job in IT.
“After the storm, I put out a thank you post, just thanking people and opening up a little about my own mental health struggles, and that really seemed to resonate too,” says Miser.
Since the January storm, Miser has posted forecast models as /u/StormFreak weekly, garnering thousands of views and hundreds of comments on each. So successful are his Reddit posts that he began a Substack to find more people who share his interests, and he’s been boosted to a strange, quasi-local celebrity status. He’s discovered entire offices of workers who look forward to his posts, using his models to help them plan work and events, an impact he never expected to have.
“I was never setting out to create content or a blog or anything along those lines. It was really organic, how it developed,” says Miser. “It’s just crazy that people have found so much interest in it, but I’m appreciative of it, y’know?”
Miser originally got into meteorology because of a fear of bad storms. Photo by Rob Liggett.
Although he’s lived in Pittsburgh the past 16 years, Miser grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., an area that frequently experiences intense seasonal weather phenomena.
“Between the tornadoes we experienced there and the lake effect snow when I went to college up near South Bend, I’ve always been fascinated by the weather,” says Miser.
But Miser’s relationship with weather wasn’t always so cordial.
“It started out, funny enough, as an anxiety. I was terrified of storms. I have very vivid memories of hiding under beds from storms,” says Miser.
His interest slowly developed out of an effort to quell those fears by better understanding the science of meteorology.
“Over time, that anxiety turned into a fascination, not just with the weather itself, but how it happens, how it forms,” he says.
Miser looks at possible weather patterns for the Western Pennsylvania region on his phone. Photo by Rob Liggett.
By his teen years, Miser had a full-fledged passion for meteorology. TV weather personalities became more than just faces on a screen, but experts and mentors to learn from. While other kids collected signed baseball cards or photos of celebrities, Miser had a notebook full of signatures from weatherpeople.
“For a long time, I thought it was so nerdy, but I’ve come to appreciate that passion of mine,” he says with a laugh.
Though he’s always used the username StormFreak online, Miser wasn’t initially known for his weather predictions. He initially gained attention on Pittsburgh social media for his reporting on Covid-19 transmission rates in the area.
“I’m a systems analyst as my actual day job, so I like looking at data, understanding patterns, so when Covid happened, I was really fascinated with the whole thing,” says Miser. “I was very interested in how it was being reported, and it felt like the data was being underreported at the time, so I just decided to start aggregating the data myself and putting it out there on Reddit.”
He would tabulate case numbers based on available data and project how the curve might rise or fall over the coming days, allowing residents to better understand their personal risk level, and take necessary precautions. This eventually became its own Reddit subforum, /r/COVID19PGH, providing a space for sharing data, questions and personal stories during a time when we were more disconnected from each other than ever.
Miser’s posts did more than help people decide whether to mask up. Commenters consistently expressed how much the posts meant to them, helping them combat misinformation in their community, and providing comfort and clarity during a time of crisis when leaders in Washington could not.
Bolstered by fellow Redditors willing to help moderate and post when he couldn’t, Miser kept up a daily grind of compiling and posting COVID infection data for the Pittsburgh area for over a year.
Ultimately, though, he had to leave /r/COVID19PGH in the hands of his helpers, because he had a new ambition on his mind: running for office.
“Obviously, the 2016 and 2020 election cycles had a big impact on me. I became very disheartened by the state of politics in general,” says Miser. “I think you see this in my StormFreak posts, but I try to see both sides of a story and find the things that unite us, instead of the things that divide us. I wanted to bring that into politics.”
Photo by Rob Liggett.
Thus, in 2021, and in defiance of his anxieties about putting himself out there, Miser decided to run for Swissvale Borough Council. A newcomer to local politics, he reached out to Allegheny County Councilwoman Bethany Hallam for assistance. With Hallam’s expertise at his back, he organized his campaign, knocked on doors promoting his candidacy, and ultimately won a four-year term with 1,277 votes.
Not only did he earn his seat, but in his lone term, he helped Swissvale make meaningful improvements in education funding and transparency.
“My biggest accomplishment was to provide funding to the Wilkins School Community Center for their maker space and playground enhancements,” says Miser. “I also helped to make police data accessible through our website and helped facilitate the regionalization of our police department with Braddock Hills.”
However, Miser ultimately decided not to run again when his term ended in 2025. In addition to making only $180 a month for the time-consuming job, he said he found it deeply challenging to overcome the entrenched bureaucracy and conflicting interests inherent in governments of all stripes. He posted a reddit AMA (ask me anything) about the experience.
“I think our government works great if everyone has the best intentions,” says Miser. “But I think there’s a lot of people who just want to be people in positions of power, and those are not the people who are most interested in your interests.”
u/StormFreak’s most recent weather predictions.
Internet usernames provide considerable anonymity to people looking to express their honest opinions online. But each one (well, some of them, at least) conceals a real person, whose life contains just as many beautiful and terrible vicissitudes as our own. Through his Covid reporting, his time on Swissvale Borough Council, and now his weekly StormFreak posts on Reddit and Substack, connecting with people, whether he knows them or not, has been the thread that always carries through.
In a time in history when so many are dealing with hardships, for Miser, that thread has held transformative power.
“I think what’s been more meaningful about it than anything is because it’s happened at this period of my life where I’m going through a lot of transitions, a lot of mental health issues,” says Miser. “It’s really helped me embrace who I am.”