At night, Justin Oertel cleans classrooms at a Brandon school. By day, he informs nearly 150,000 Manitobans whether it’s safe to mow the lawn, drive to Dauphin, or brace for a wall of wind.
He’s not a meteorologist by degree. He doesn’t work in an office stacked with Dopplers and screens. His empire is built on a Facebook page and started with a laptop he got for Christmas when he was 15.
And for thousands of Manitobans, he’s their go-to weatherman.
When he started The Weather Centre of Manitoba back in 2013, Oertel’s audience was a dozen friends from Crocus Plains High School. Now it’s a province-wide platform people check before they check Environment Canada.
He didn’t buy ads. He didn’t game the algorithm. He did what all kids do when they’re serious about something: spam comment sections.
“I’d copy and paste my page link under local news articles until I got banned from most of them,” Oertel laughs. “But it worked.”
It did. In twelve years, the Facebook page became something more. It’s a weather authority, an educational hub, a minor lifeline. And a registered business.
Oertel doesn’t describe himself as a scientist. He describes himself as a guy with a deep respect for prairie weather, a love of lightning photography, and a need to get it right. And he describes weather the way a preacher might talk about the Book of Revelation: dangerous, majestic, and entirely capable of humbling a person.
“My passion came from my dad,” he says. “He’d be out taking pictures of storms. I’d be out watching him.” That passion mixed with prairie pragmatism gave rise to something rare: a volunteer meteorological vigilante.
His team now includes his dad, his wife (who moderates comments), and several weather-watchers from Brandon and Winnipeg. Together, they chase storms, share model forecasts, and serve up alerts faster than some official agencies.
He’s careful not to overstate it. “We’re not issuing warnings, that’s Environment and Climate Change Canada. But we do our best to amplify those alerts. A lot of people don’t know where to find them.”
And sometimes, their updates make the difference.
“People tell us they’ve left their trailers or changed plans because of a live stream we posted,” he says. “They saw it coming. And they got out of the way.”
Storm chasing has become a key part of the team’s work. It’s a hobby that combines adrenaline, photography, and public service. On the page, Oertel’s live videos sometimes show the kind of grainy, rain-slick footage that local news stations envy but rarely capture.
He’s especially interested in what he calls “ground truth” or on-the-road visuals that fill in the gaps left by radar systems. “Radar beams go up,” he explains. “So the further the storm is, the higher in the sky you’re seeing. But the danger is at ground level. That’s what we try to show.”
And it’s not just about severe weather. Oertel wants to make weather useful in addition to being accurate. That means giving people more than a vague “30% chance of storms.” It means telling them when to cancel the barbecue, where the hail is falling, and why there’s a thin sheet of ice on every sidewalk.
His dream? A hyperlocal platform that fills in all the blind spots.
“We want to do things like an ‘Ice Index,’” he says. “You know, it was plus two yesterday, minus ten now, sidewalks are probably skating rinks. Be careful walking the dog.”
Despite the page’s popularity, Oertel still works evenings at a local school. But he’s closer to making weather his full-time job. “That’s the goal in the next two to three years,” he says. “Leave the mop behind.”
In 2026, The Weather Centre of Manitoba will speak at Ag Days, delivering a summer outlook to farmers who rely on forecasts the way stockbrokers rely on market reports. The pressure? Significant. But Oertel’s calm about it. After all, he’s been preparing for this since he was a teenager.
And beyond the speaking gigs, website development, and video ambitions, Oertel has an even bigger dream: building a more connected forecasting system. More cameras. More weather stations. More boots on the ground.
“We don’t have enough infrastructure out here,” he says. “I’d love to see us work with the province, the cities, get more weather stations up across southern Manitoba.”
Of course, he knows what people think. That weather is small talk. That it’s filler. That it’s something people mutter about when they can’t find anything else to say.
But he sees it differently.
“I think everyone’s got a passion,” Oertel says. “This just happens to be mine.”
And that passion has turned one janitor into Manitoba’s most trusted weatherman, one update at a time.
