WxManBran.com, founded by Meteorologist Brandan Keen, provides reliable, trustworthy, and educational coverage of the tropics and hurricanes, helping every community stay informed and understand the key factors behind each forecast. During hurricane season, when information overload and worst-case hype flood social media, WxManBran.com cuts through the noise with honest interpretation and a clear bottom line focused on what families and emergency managers need to make confident decisions.
This site is connected to a live Weather Data Dashboard. During landfalling hurricanes, a truck-mounted Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station streams various meteorological parameters to the site in real time. Connectivity is maintained via a Starlink satellite dish to avoid cellular outages. These observations provide ground truth and real-time updates, improving critical timing and operational decision-making for emergency management agencies and utility providers.
Three additional Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather stations, along with the necessary data logging hardware and shelter housings, are prepared for operational deployment. These units will be strategically positioned during future hurricane intercepts to enable simultaneous, multi-location surface observations and improved spatial capture of storm impacts.
A steel wire reinforced, height-adjustable mast has been developed to raise the anemometer anywhere from 10–40 ft. This enables WMO 10 m (33 ft.) standard wind measurements and improves peak wind/gust capture on the vehicle-based station.
Hi, my name is Brandan Keen, and welcome to WxManBran.com. I built this site to be easy to navigate, informative, educational, and genuinely useful. It started in May 2025 as a bare GitHub repository to show prospective employers my Python work and data visualizations (you can still see that here). Since then, it has grown into the beginnings of something I believe only God could have inspired me to start.
My passion for weather began when I was five. From the back of my parents’ minivan, I saw tornado damage from the 1998 Central Florida Tornado Outbreak in Winter Garden, Florida. Those scenes stuck with me, and whenever a thunderstorm built near my elementary school, I would panic and cry, sometimes asking the office to call my mom so I knew she was okay.
In 2004, everything changed. Hurricane Charley roared through Punta Gorda as a strong Category 4, with wind gusts of 105 mph recorded at Orlando International Airport. My house, just northwest of the airport, took intense impacts, and I missed three weeks of school because of power and grid outages. This experience sparked a deep fascination with tracking hurricanes, which grew even more when Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne hit Florida three and six weeks later, respectively. I grabbed my parents’ old JVC camcorder (not waterproof), covered it with a hand towel, and “reported” outside in rain and winds that were maybe 30 mph at most.
The next year, 2005, I began to print plotting sheets from the National Hurricane Center every morning before school, marking each storm’s latitude and longitude, shaded watches and warnings with colored pencils, and kept a log of every advisory number, wind, pressure, and movement. I didn’t realize the season would become record-breaking at the time, but by the end I was worn out from tracking so many storms.
In 2010, I attended the University of North Florida on a baseball scholarship and, after a few transfers, graduated from Flagler College with a B.A. in Business Administration in 2015. In 2016, while still chasing a professional baseball career back home, I felt pulled to intercept Hurricane Hermine, the first U.S. landfalling hurricane since Wilma in 2005. Hermine was a Category 1 with 85 mph winds, but it was my first real taste of field work and it planted the seed that if I wanted to do this safely and successfully, I needed a meteorology degree.
In 2020, after hanging up my cleats, I went back to school. I took online community college classes in 2021, then enrolled at Florida Institute of Technology in 2022, completing my B.S. in Meteorology in May 2025. While studying, I balanced classes with intercepts of Hurricanes Debby, Helene, and Milton during the 2024 season, this time with a weather station mounted on my truck to capture data inside the storm.
Looking ahead, my goal is to intercept and gather data from as many landfalling hurricanes as I can, keep improving this site, and share updates on the tropics that can help ease anxiety while providing clarity and truth. I feel incredibly blessed to pursue what I love, and I hope something here encourages you, teaches you, or simply connects us through a shared interest for weather.
— Brandan Keen (WxManBran)
Have an idea or suggestion to make this website even better? I'd love to hear from you! Write to me at [email protected].