Colin

Born and raised in an outdoor-orientated family in the San Francisco Bay Area, Colin McCarthy experienced a myriad of weather events from a young age throughout his family’s travels. Ranging from earthquakes and wildfires to drought and flash-floods, California was a perfect storm for Colin to develop his passion for covering weather.

His love for meteorology began with his family’s backpacking and camping trips in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Through these explorations, Colin developed an interest in the outdoors, but it was his fascination with extreme weather that captivated him the most. He created his Twitter account in 2017 at the age of 13 to learn from and follow meteorologists. Shortly after, he began posting content on various weather events occurring in California and took a keen interest in documenting thunderstorms and extreme weather events using his GoPro camera.

It wasn’t until August of 2020 where his account began to gain some traction online. Extreme heat and drought conditions coupled with dry severe thunderstorms produced the worst wildfire season in California history. On August 16th, Colin stayed up all night filming a dry thunderstorm outbreak for 10 hours straight. In the following days, the same lighting strikes Colin captured ignited into the SCU and CZU Lightning Complex wildfires which burnt over 800k acres across the Bay Area. He subsequently covered these and hundreds of over fires sparked from the thunderstorms becoming a well known source for wildfire information in the coming months.

Since 2020, Colin has expanded his passion for weather and climate, building one of the largest platforms on the internet, US Stormwatch, covering extreme weather events and natural disasters ranging from Hurricane Ian to Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano eruption. His work has been featured in some of the largest news and media outlets including Washington Post, NFL, ESPN, The Guardian, Bleacher Report and CBS as well being featured in multiple documentaries. Additionally, he has been interviewed for profile stories by the likes of SFGate, SF Standard and University of California, Davis.

Colin’s passion to communicate succinct, engaging and knowledgeable information to the general public about the complex science of meteorology and climate has driven him to pursue a career in meteorology. Colin is pursuing his dreams of becoming a meteorologist at UC Davis studying atmospheric science. He is currently a Digital Content Creator at MyRadar and a Social Media Ambassador for Ambient Weather.