About

WE ARE STORM CHASERS

Keeping victoria informed of severe weather

Melbourne Storm Chasers is a group of weather enthusiasts based across Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Follow us as we share our photos, observations, thoughts and knowledge of the weather, including notable upcoming severe weather events in Victoria.

meet the administrative TEAM

Storm Chaser

Nick McCartney

Nick McCartney’s interest and passion for thunderstorms and severe weather began some 20 years ago. This passion grew in his mid-teens. He became fascinated with the amazing lightning displays that often sparked up across Port Phillip Bay with frontal systems, and other systems that created severe storms, and this led him to become an avid storm photographer.
 
The interest thus created led Nick to form Melbourne Storm Chasers (MSC) – a severe weather page that rapidly grew to be the premier storm-chasing page in Victoria. He expanded this to include a variety of weather services that concentrate on tracking thunderstorm activity, producing severe weather content, updates, and live streams across Victoria. We regularly receive hundreds of amazing photos and videos from our members across the country.
 
MSC’s aim is to alert and educate the public of Victoria about thunderstorm activity and severe weather in general, and this helps the Bureau of Meteorology disseminate thunderstorm warnings on a continuing basis. This is produced utilizing all modern predictive tools including current radar and satellite imagery, as well as output from the various forecast models used to create our forecasts and predictions.
 
Melbourne Storm Chasers mission and goals are to provide a friendly and informative online page where members can access warnings, forecasts, and receive regular updates from us based on our educated knowledge and thoughts.
 
It’s turned out to be a great success with the support of 93,000 followers from across the country.
 
Thank you to our followers for their interest and continued support in our page.

Meteorologist

Dick Whitaker

Dick Whitaker graduated in Science from Monash University in 1969, was conscripted and spent two years in the Army before joining the Bureau of Meteorology in 1971.

His interest in meteorology continued following his departure from the Bureau in 2002 and he joined The Weather Channel soon after. This morphed into Sky News Weather, where he was Chief Meteorologist from 2012 until his retirement in 2016.

Dick has a particular interest in weather education and he has published several books about the topic including publications for both Time Life and Readers Digest. He is also a regular public speaker, providing talks about the weather to such community groups as Probus, Rotary, University of the Third Age, Bushfire Brigades and schools.

Dick’s connection with Melbourne Storm Chasers has provided another outlet for his interest in all things meteorology and he regularly teams up with Nick to provide on-line contributions and discussion about the current and developing weather situation.