Everyone in Cape Town is a closet meteorologist, Facebook thread reveals

Cape Town’s citizens just love talking about the weather, and that’s no more apparent than in this Facebook comment thread.

Popular snow forecast and monitoring site Snow Report’s Facebook page is laced with comments about Cape Town’s current winter storm after it asked people to send in reports of the current conditions of their suburb.

And Facebook users naturally obliged.

Read more: Memeburn’s ongoing coverage of Cape Town’s winter storm

The post received around 700 comments to date, with a further 200 shares and 570 reactions, with some users also posting images and videos of their surrounds during the storm.

Cape Town’s winter storm has left a number of services across the city cancelled, including schools and roads

Initially, comments were questioning if rain was ever actually going to arrive in the city.

“Good breeze in Durbanville, but the rain is not spectacular yet, as some predicted. If I understood it correctly, the prediction is for the worst to come tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, yes? At the moment it is not yet any worse than many winter storms I’ve experienced here in Cape Town,” one commenter wrote.

That soon changed through.

Around 10pm Tuesday evening, the thread’s tone got a bit more serious.

“Dolphin Beach, Blouberg. Wind and rain started 22:10 but now quite heavy with the Vlei looking choppy and buckets of water falling on Marine drive. Drive carefully. Looking out over the sea on the other side- looking rougher now, no visibility. No city lights or lighthouse lights anymore. There was a tugboat out there 40mins ago,” one user remarked.

While not everyone commenting on the thread is a trained meteorologist, that doesn’t mean citizen journalism isn’t being practiced, with users reporting on and broadcasting what they see.

All this is seemingly being powered by social media and the prevalence of mobile technology, like smartphones.

As a result, it’s a good source of immediate information if you live in Cape Town’s metropolitan area or the Western Cape at large.

Interested in joining the conversation? Visit the ever-lengthening thread in the post below.

Feature image: Table Mountain December 2013, by Jean Francois Fournier Photographie via Flickr (CC 2.0 BY-SA, resized)