Kai Risdahl

Matt Lanza is one of the meteorologists behind the popular Space City weather account in Houston.

He's also still a full-time forecaster for the energy industry.

He says you can tell if a weather account is legit if the person running it has a degree in meteorology or a certification.

And if they don't, look at their track record.

If every weather event to them ends up being the biggest, the worst, the most extreme, all the writing is in all caps with lots of exclamation points, they're probably just trying to hook you.

and get you to engage so they can monetize their account.

At Space City Weather, Lanza says they do the opposite.

Most of the time we want to be kind of boring, but when the stuff gets a little crazy, you're going to notice us really ramp things up.

So that people really pay attention when it matters, like during Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston in 2017.

After that storm, many wrote in to Space City Weather to thank them.

One in particular struck me was someone saying like, you know, I trust you guys.

I read you guys every day.

When you started writing the way you did ahead of the storm, I took stuff that they had on the ground floor of their house and moved it up to the second floor.

The first floor of their house flooded, but they'd been able to save things that mattered.

That's the goal, right?

The goal is not, it is to get that engagement.

It is to get ways to monetize it, but that's not the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal, Lanza says, is to get people good information so they can protect their stuff and themselves from extreme weather.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

We were talking jobs up top.