When does the good weather come? How long will the heatwave last? When will it rain and what extreme phenomena await us? These are questions that Bihorians often ask themselves, but they don’t always find reliable answers, although the number of applications that predict the weather has exploded. “The weather forecast is difficult to make for more than 48 hours, and we, in Romania, don’t even have a high-performance infrastructure”, explains Roberto Popa, a young Bihorian passionate about meteorology.
In less than two years, Roberto created an audience as large as the population of Oradea on the Facebook page specifically created to transmit information on the evolution of temperatures and meteorological phenomena in Bihor. He learned everything he knows by himself, but he manages to make correct and, above all, useful predictions!
Passionate from a young age
During the winters of his childhood, Roberto used to sit with his nose pressed to the window, wondering when it would snow. “It’s my favorite season and I really like the snow,” explains the young man, now 28 years old. He grew up in the countryside, in the village of Tulca, near Salonta, which he adored covered in white.
When he grew up, Roberto wanted to “melt” the suspense and began to follow the signs of nature, to understand when the right conditions for snow are created. He had a simple thermometer that hadn’t cost his parents a lot of money, but he watched it carefully, noting the increases or decreases in outside temperatures.
At 13, he received his first weather station as a gift (photo), and for him it was the perfect gift. “I was following atmospheric pressure, temperatures and humidity and starting to understand what the weather was going to be like,” he says. This led him to learn the types of clouds, in order to understand their movements or what they “bring”.
Also following information from foreign websites, he started making his own forecasts since he was a teenager, information that he then shared with his relatives. “Everyone in the family asked me how the weather would be and called me Busu de Bihor (referral to the famous TV presenter – no)“, says Roberto.
“The weather is changing”
Although he moved to Salonta, where he works in a multinational company, Roberto still has a weather station at his parents’ house in Tulca, better performing than the one in his adolescence and which collects data such as atmospheric pressure, wind speed, humidity, ultraviolet rays, temperature or the number of flashes. It helps him to make forecasts for 2-3 days. “A forecast is safe for at most 48 hours. What exceeds this interval has an accuracy of 60%”, he emphasizes.
Why can we only rely on short-term forecasts? “In spring, summer and autumn, the conditions change a lot from one hour to the next. Shear winds and convective systems appear, which form over a radius of at most 90 kilometers and bring storms”, explains Roberto.
In addition, the infrastructure in Romania is not the best either, the amateur meteorologist collecting data stored by sensors from neighboring countries, in order to forecast what will happen in Bihor. “I follow the models made by specialized websites in Europe and contribute with the data collected by my weather station,” he says, confessing that he checks the data ten times a day. “The weather is changeable, even when it seems stable”.
Everything he knows he learned by himself, reading and talking to other passionate meteorologists. In high school, he was in a philology class, but he didn’t go to college.
With a large audience
In order to share the weather forecasts he makes with the people of Bihor, two years ago Roberto launched a Facebook page, “Meteo-Tulca Bihor”, where he posts daily information about the weather conditions for Bihor and neighboring counties. Because its data turns out to be real, the page gained audience, reaching, without any paid advertising, an audience of almost 200,000 people. Almost as much as the entire population of Oradea!
“I am happy and thank everyone who follows and appreciates my posts, which I try to do in as accessible a language as possible. I hope that Bihor will become the most informed county, from a meteorological point of view,” says the Bihorian.
Roberto is also happy that his forecasts are used by the local authorities, more precisely by the Agricultural Directorate and the Bihor National Roads Section, institutions that need to know what the weather will be like in order to forecast their work. He is also proud that, last summer, he accurately predicted the violent storm that swept through Oradea, breaking hundreds of trees. “I remember that at 4 p.m. a boy left a comment on my post, saying that the storm I predicted was nowhere to be found. In 20 minutes, the flood came,” he recalls.
We will have more extreme phenomena
Roberto says that, from now on, the people of Bihor should expect to witness more extreme phenomena. “The period from April 15 to June 15 is very unstable, because the air currents change, in the transition from spring to summer. Up there, where the clouds form, the temperatures are low, and at ground level we have high temperatures, and these differences causes strong phenomena,” explains the meteorologist.
In the summer, there will be other strong storms, as a result of global warming. “I have hopes that in the next 10-15 years, global warming will be stopped, by reducing greenhouse gases,” says Roberto.
Since 2017, it documents the warming trend affecting Bihor and the lack of precipitation, especially in winter. “We are facing the lack of snow, including in the mountains, and Bihor often has the highest temperatures in the whole country,” he says. However, the county is not heading towards desertification, as it happens in the south of Romania, because it rains enough in the other seasons. “We are helped by the Western Hills and the Apuseni Mountains, thanks to which in the May-June period we have the most precipitation in Romania,” explains the young man.
For the next period, the passionate meteorologist forecasts high heat and instability: “We will suddenly go from the sun to storms and vice versa”. But Roberto reminds that forecasts that exceed three days have a lower degree of accuracy, so those who want to be always informed should follow the daily posts of Meteo-Tulca Bihor…
Tags: Selftaught meteorology young Roberto Popa forecasts ..
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