Move Over, Glen Powell

In the midst of an unrelenting New York heat wave, I met John Homenuk at the American Museum of Natural History. It’s the closest I could bring the storm chaser, consulting meteorologist, and admin of the beloved “New York Metro Weather” X account to anything close to the actual outdoors without us both succumbing to heat stroke. Before he arrived, Homenuk texted me to profusely apologize for running late and promised that he’d be “sweating” his “absolute life away” by the time he got there. But when I spotted him snaking his way through a throng of tourists, there were no signs of perspiration. Rather, Homenuk looked a bit like he’d just walked off a movie set. The 34-year-old’s salt-and-pepper-colored hair is cut short, apart from the few curls that spring loose and graze his forehead, and his stormy blue eyes gleam, contrasting with his golden, tanned skin. If New Yorkers knew what the man behind their favorite weather account actually looked like, there’d be a very different kind of heat wave.

Homenuk has been obsessed with the weather since he was a child growing up in Brooklyn. It started when he was 8, he says. A giant storm whirred over his family’s home, and like any kid, he was afraid. “I just remember my dad picking me up and bringing me to the basement, and I was scared,” he tells me. “The weather, you have no control over it at all. And if you don’t understand it, those storms are scary. I figured out that’s what I wanted to do.” This might have been a passing thought for an average 8-year-old, but not for Homenuk, who spent many nights watching storms pass on the front porch with his grandfather. (“I was a crazy kid. He settled me down,” he says, walking around the museum. After his grandfather’s death, when Homenuk was 14, he grew quiet. “I didn’t really know who I was for a while there.”) His interest in weather endured, and in high school, he found a place for people like himself: weather chat rooms, where he could discuss ball lightning and lenticular clouds with other people who wanted to discuss ball lightning and lenticular clouds. This, naturally, led to a blog: newyorkmetroweather.blogspot.com. “There wasn’t a New York City weather blog at the time,” he says. “My little high-school self realized that there was an opening for that, and I had a lot to express about the weather.” Between classes, Homenuk updated the site with straightforward forecasts and technical details about what was “going on under the hood” of complicated weather phenomena until his junior year, when he moved the whole thing over to X.

After studying meteorology at Kean University, Homenuk hoped that after graduation, he could follow storms on the road, like in his not-so-surprisingly favorite film, Twister, which he says he’s seen “too many times to count.” (He told me he was “pretty hesitant” for the Glen Powell sequel.) Unable to find a weather-related job after graduation, Homenuk wound up selling insurance in Minneapolis. Where, incidentally, the storms were plentiful. In his free time, he started chasing them.

Storm-chasing is slightly less dramatic than it might seem in the movies, he tells me, guiding us through the museum (still, he gallantly offered to download the museum map and path-find for the both of us, the Glen Powell to my Daisy Edgar-Jones). Before a chase, he’ll start perusing weather models to find out where the nearest storm is brewing. Then, on the morning of said storm, he’ll start his day with a workout (we can tell), a cold brew, “a good hearty breakfast” consisting of toast, two eggs over easy, and bacon (just a step or two short of the famous Twister steak-and-eggs meal scene), and a second peek at the radar. Then he just drives — hundreds of miles, sometimes, for a storm that might last all of 15 minutes. Other times, he gets lucky and watches a twister move through its path for hours. More often than not, the chases are busts — out of ten chases, he’ll catch a storm on about two or three of them — which, over time, has alleviated his girlfriend’s (unfortunately for single readers, he has a girlfriend) worries about his safety when driving after storms in distant flyover states. When we stop for a break near a display case housing an array of turtle shells, I tell him I’m from Kansas, and he finds a picture he thinks I might like of a sunset in Flint Hills. A pink sky glows over a cluster of mammatus clouds. “People call them …” He lowers his voice. “Boob clouds.”

Eventually, he says, he took a leap and left insurance. Around 2018, he went out on his own and started a weather consulting firm. The basic premise of his job is that he advises stockbrokers, hedge funds, and farmers on weather patterns and how crops are doing in various parts of the world. His company has done well enough that he now storm-chases in an Audi. “It’s got great tires!” he assures me, noting he has it “fitted out internally” with a laptop dock to keep watch on the radar and cell booster to stay connected. “My storm-chasing buddies make fun of me constantly, like, ‘Here comes Mr. Audi!’”

Throughout all of this — even his move to Minnesota — he managed to keep up the X account, writing dispatches on the weather in New York for his fan base, which exploded after Hurricane Sandy and eventually grew to some 131,000 followers, plus 700 paid subscribers to his Patreon, where he writes more elaborate dispatches (including a weekly Vibecheck; recently, “Welcome to Fake Spring 2.0”). He’s able to sell out in-person events, like a panel he’s hosting for 200 audience members loosely about “how to be more well-versed in the weather.” Originally, Homenuk kept the account’s posts straightforward. But then he noticed his readers liked when his posts had a little personality. So suddenly, he got kind of — sassy. “Just another beautiful summer day in NYC (derogatory),” for instance, or “Wednesday’s Weather Rating: 2/10. Our long national nightmare continues …” “I grew up around an Italian family,” he says. “That snarkiness is part of the whole vibe.”

In real life, though, snarkiness is seemingly not part of Homenuk’s whole vibe at all. When we take a break from all the walking — we sit on the steps and under the cavernous archways of the Gilder Center — he shows me a picture of his yellow lab, Joe, who died in 2021. He still has a shrine he erected for Joe at his house in Minneapolis, filled with photos of the two growing up together and a letter Homenuk’s father wrote him after Joe’s death. He hasn’t tried adopting a dog since. “I don’t think I’d be a good dog dad right now. I’m all over the place,” he says, because he’s on the road about 50 days out of the year. When Homenuk walks me to the subway, he hugs me good-bye, then says: “Let me know if you need any help transcribing any of this. I feel so bad.” A few days later, my phone pings at 8:30 in the morning. It’s Homenuk. He’s seen Twisters, and it was “AWESOME!!” It seems his worries about the remake have been allayed. I call him, eager to hear more. “They did a really good job with the meteorology behind it,” he says, still brimming with enthusiasm. “They’re mentioning all these technical terms, and I’m sitting there just smiling ear to ear. They talked about capping, which is when there’s a layer of warm air above our heads that inhibits the development of thunderstorms.” (Too rarely do people talk about capping, in Homenuk’s opinion.) I click over to his X account, where he also seems to be shouting enthusiastically about the film. “I have vivid memories of watching the original Twister as a kid. I couldn’t wait to grow up — to forecast the weather and to chase storms. Twisters has reminded me just how lucky I am. Wake up, 8-year-old John. You are literally living your dream.”

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