At 10:44 pm Eastern time on May 16, Ryan Hall spotted a blue square on his radar indicating debris flying into the air and realized a huge tornado was racing toward Somerset, Kentucky.
“We’ve been watching this storm for a while, we’ve been hootin’ and hollerin’ for a while, hopefully the message has gotten out there and we know to be in our safe spots,” Hall warned his YouTube audience in a calm voice with a Southern twang.
A silver robot with blue eyes popped onto the screen to tell Hall that a viewer had commented about tiny houses near the tornado. “Oh really?” Hall replied to his AI robot, known as Y’all Bot.
The 31-year-old host of Ryan Hall, Y’all—one of YouTube’s most popular weather channels, with 2.8 million subscribers—went live for nearly 12 hours that day as more than 70 tornadoes swept through the central US, killing at least 28 people. Nineteen of the dead were in Kentucky. Hall, too, was under tornado warning as he streamed from his home in Kentucky.
Sirens went off in Somerset, but the National Weather Service lagged behind in upgrading its tornado warning, Hall told viewers. He also said that recent cuts had left the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky, short-staffed. “We’re about to have a large tornado go through a very populated area with much less warning than what there should be as a result of that,” he said. It wasn’t until 10:57 pm that the NWS finally upgraded its tornado warning for Somerset.
Hall doesn’t have a meteorology degree, but he employs meteorologists like 27-year-old Andy Hill, who frequently appears on his livestream. Hill was on vacation during the deadly tornadoes but noted that Hall had correctly read the radar. “He was just looking at, essentially, patterns and radar data, which is what I've attempted to teach him over the years,” Hill said. “On May 16, I think Ryan definitely saved some lives.”
A new generation of storm forecasters are going live on YouTube for hours during severe weather events, offering real-time updates to millions of subscribers through a network of storm chasers, and even using AI. Their devoted fans help shape the forecast by sending on-the-ground photos of these storms, for example lemon-sized hail, for the streamers to show live on their screens. As the Trump administration slashes federal weather forecasting staff and climate change supercharges storms, their reports are not only entertaining but also crucial and potentially life-saving.
This form of weather content is growing rapidly, but so far there are two main YouTube weather forecasters. Hall, who employs about 40 people across his media business and nonprofit, and YouTube’s second biggest weather streamer, Max Velocity, are game changers who frequently warn their millions of fans about tornadoes on the ground before the National Weather Service issues official alerts. They do this by interpreting blobs of color on the radar and hosting feeds of storm chasers going live from their vehicles. Hall’s AI bot interacts with him during storms, and it even has its own channel where it goes live 24/7.