28 / matters magazine / summer 2019 D o you remem- ber Winter Storm Wesley, the April (!) blizzardthatdumped snow on the Great Plains and Midwest and ripped through with winds up to 107 mph? Or maybe you’re more impressed by thunderstorms with nickel-sized hail hitting Texas in May. With wildfires, floods, hurricanes and torna- does surprising people all over the globe, there’s no denying that these new weather trends are extreme and unpredictable. So how do we prepare ourselves? Can we even do so? According to Max Weisenfeld: Yes, we can. “I’m a weather hobbyist. I’m not a meteorologist,” Weisenfeld warns me as we sit down at his kitchen table in Maplewood. “I try to make that clear,” he adds with a warm smile. For all his humility, Weisenfeld is a fount of sci- entific information. And he’s created a very gener- ous way to share what he knows so he can help the Maplewood/South Orange community be prepared for the next big weather event. It’s called MAPSO Weather. This “weather hobby” of Weisenfeld's started shortly after he and his wife decided that he’d be a stay-at-home dad in 2000. Well, not exactly stay-at- home: After a couple of years, Weisenfeld got a job at a sleepaway camp with the New Jersey Y and took his daughter and son with him. He had always had an interest in following the National Weather Ser- vice (NWS) radar to tell when a big storm was com- ing, and at camp this became very useful to both the kids and the staff. When Weisenfeld got back to Maplewood, a few of his friends in the neighborhood started threads about the weather on Maplewood Online. (Face- book hadn’t really hit by then.) He stuck a rain gauge in his backyard (next to his stone Buddha sculpture) and started studying the daily accounts on the NWS so he could get and share the most accurate picture of what was headed towards Essex County. Weisenfeld says it’s really just about translating the data that’s already available online. “The television weather reports over-sim- plify, and the professional meteorologists are hard to understand…so I try to be in the middle.” The data that Weisenfeld is analyzing is pretty intricate, though. As he soon learned, the local chapter of the NWS (located on Long Island) actually focuses on announcing the weather in New York City. The weather systems and storm tracks for Essex County can be very different from New York City’s, though. Weisenfeld describes the SOMA community as a narrow, steep river valley. Usually the weather comes over the Poconos, picks up speed and then hits South Mountain. (That’s why you might see a blanket of fog or even snow on the top of South Mountain while it’s clear on Valley Street.) Weisenfeld started interpreting the NWS infor- mation and posting his reports on Maplewood On- line. Then, as Facebook gained steam, he started his own page there, called MAPSO Weather. Every time he posted something new, he got more followers chiming in or asking questions about his findings. What started as an amusing distraction, has grown to a devoted community of almost 3,000 Can We Arm Ourselves Against Climate Change? Maplewood’s Max Weisenfeld says it starts with being informed BY ABBY SHER