Thomasino Mendez

Hi, my name is Thomasino, but you can call me Tommy. I’ve been infatuated with weather since I was about 3 years old, every morning I would run to the living room TV to watch the weather channel. I knew from then that I wanted this to be my career. At the time I wanted to become a chief meteorologist at a News Station but as I got older, I realized that I wouldn’t be making as much as an impact so I decided to lean toward a in field research based career. I’m currently a freshman at UAlbany studying Atmospheric Sciences and in progress to pursue a Ph.D for meteorology.

Living in Coastal NC, I struggle to get the jaw dropping  storm structures that you would see in the plains, but I do get to endure constant shelf clouds from outflow boundaries, random popup supercells in the summer, and finally Hurricanes once every few years the most impactful being Hurricane Florence in 2018 where I was in ground zero being trapped from the rest of the world due to the severe flooding it produced. I also endured through Hurricane Isaias in 2020, even though it wasn’t as powerful as Florence I managed to luck out and have a EF-1 tornado hit my house. Watching it through glass windows was an experience that just mesmerizes you almost like in the opening scene in twister where Jo was watching the F5 tornado rip the door off of the basement along with her dad.

In my free time I enjoy gardening, going on road trips, and fishing.

Gear used:

• DJI Mavic Air 2
• Iphone 13 Pro
• Nikon Coolpix P100
• GoPro Hero 9 Black