Cyber-weathermen Alex Marra and Bill Potter a match made in the heavens

Bill Potter and Alex Marra (facing camera). (Photo: Phyllis McCabe

“The superstorm of 1993 was a big trigger for me,” he said. “It set something off …. If I wasn’t playing baseball, then I was recording the weather. I would put the five-day forecast on my bedroom door and forecast for the family,” said Potter. Marra quipped that this was Potter’s first foray into “posting weather on the wall.”

Potter suppressed his impulse to study meteorology in college, opting instead for a more secure major in accounting. “I actually went to the top weather college,” Potter said. “When you get beyond the observation of weather, there’s a lot of detail and math …. I was afraid was going to lose my passion. I was afraid that learning all that would take my enjoyment out of it. My mathematical brain was always thinking, ‘How can I get a job?’ I knew I could get a job in accounting. It was ironic that I was afraid of making weather a job when it was a job. It basically is a second job.”

In response to numerous weather queries from friends and family, Potter put together midhudsonvalleyweather.com in 2008. His intention was simply to keep everyone he knew informed of the local weather by an easier method than continuing to field inquiring phone calls. Potter later created a Facebook page by which to drive traffic and attention to his webpage. Potter said he never thought the initiative would grow and evolve much past his website. Even though it robs hours from his day and home life, he says he can’t help himself.

Marra was originally looking for a meteorology student to intern with him. He realized, however, that teaming with someone with a lifelong passion for the importance of weather, coupled with a familiarity with the region, was a great idea.

Marra said he’s contacted regularly by people wanting to plan their events, ranging from school superintendents planning graduations to the Kingston city government scheduling its fireworks. “If the Hudson Project people had called me first,” said Marra of the music festival in Saugerties which ended abruptly with a storm and stranded hundreds in a morass for days, “I could have saved them a lot of grief.”