Community-Supported Weather

Jared Smith
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read
Monitoring yesterday’s cold front using the tools that make @chswx go: A MacBook Pro, AWIPS, VMware, and coffee.

Last month, I soft-launched a Patreon for @chswx. The response has been fantastic — thanks to your support, I’m now able to cover my monthly costs for the data feeds and software that I use to help bring you the weather, with a little leftover to grow. Many thanks to those of you who have become patrons!

With your support, I’m able to begin investments into additional tools and technology to help continue to bring the best weather information I can to the Lowcountry. This includes standing up a new, dedicated workstation for the AWIPS software I’ve adopted. (You can see it in the main monitor above!) I’ve also continued my work on a much better forecast and warning bot — not just for Twitter, but for all platforms as well as the chswx.com website.

It is fantastic to be able to say that in its tenth year, the best is yet to come for @chswx — and that’s just about compeletely because of you. @chswx has always been a community-driven endeavor. Without your reports and interaction, it would just be me shouting into the wind. For it to be community-supported exceeds any of my wildest expectations for what was, in all likelihood, going to be a brief experiment that I’d eventually forget about and wonder what might have been.

Y’all rock.


With my most important goal met and some more experience with Patreon under my belt, I’m adjusting the tiers today to make things a little simpler.

Most notably, I’ve decided to remove the $20 and $50 levels for now. Those were always a little bit of a stretch, and the market as well as feedback has proven that out. So, those are gone for now.

With those tiers gone, it doesn’t make sense to truncate up to the 700mb level anymore, so I’m renaming the tiers as follows:

  • Supporter: Base $2/mo tier
  • Early Adopter: Supporter tier, plus early access to @chswx features (such as the new bot!)
  • Swag!: Everything in Supporter and Early Adopter, plus some periodic @chswx swag (stickers, buttons, etc.).

Thanks again, everybody, for your support. Together, we are making Charleston a safer place to weather the storm.

Charleston Weather

Weather forecasts and discussions for the Charleston, SC Tri-County area (Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester).

Jared Smith

Written by

Software engineer and weather geek. Dev team manager @BoomTownROI, principal nerd @chswx.

Charleston Weather

Weather forecasts and discussions for the Charleston, SC Tri-County area (Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester).

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