Moroccan Ikea Employee Becomes Social Media Weather Sensation with 180,000 Followers

Farik El Mokkadem did not become "Mr. Weather-Mons" by chance. He has been passionate about weather phenomena since his earliest childhood. In an interview with SudInfo, he explained that his passion for weather was so great that he watched the broadcasts and everything related to it. As long as the subject discussed was the weather. "When I was very young, I was very curious about what was happening in the sky. I had a mathematical side, where I liked to plot my observations on a graph, do tests with a rain gauge. Over the years, I became interested in it and read a lot of books."

His weather forecasts are surprisingly accurate. This is what makes him a hit on social media. When asked how he manages to be so accurate, he replies that it lies in his thirst to document and educate himself, especially to raise his level in terms of climate concepts. The idea of creating a weather page was suggested to him by his fiancée, when he was unemployed. "At first, it wasn’t easy to grow and then there were big storms that I announced and I gained 15,000 subscribers at once."

Passionate about weather, certainly, but Farid El Mokkadem has learned a lot with the Météobelgique forum with the advent of the internet. "I first learned the basics and then a lot of more advanced things thanks to people like Luc Trullemans and other old-timers on the forum. Little by little and over the years, I was able to make my own forecasts and it was in 2015 that I decided to launch my Facebook page Météo-Mons which has been growing for 2 and a half years now," reports SudInfo.

Météo-Mons is very popular in Belgium, and gets nearly 200,000 views per week at a minimum, to the delight of the one who runs this page. "I really have a community that supports me and follows me actively. They are extremely friendly and grateful, I rarely get nasty comments. There will always be the Mons base, because my heart remains in Mons. But it’s true that I now talk about all of Belgium, I’m even hesitating to change the name to add "Belgium" to have even more visibility," he confides.

This breakthrough has opened many doors for the young Moroccan, who is receiving more and more partnership requests. But he prefers not to rush and takes the time to think.

"I’m going to set myself up as a complementary freelancer. It’s becoming more and more serious and if I know how to live from my passion in a few years, I’ll be really happy," he specifies.