These are Skyscraper logic puzzles, with a few twists. After solving each puzzle, the 5 storms in each city can be connected in 1-5 order to spell out a letter or a number. The puzzle solutions, as well as walkthroughs for each puzzle, are provided
where you can click the tabs on the bottom to see per-puzzle walkthroughs.
Solving the six puzzles spells out "1250 FT". Searching this reveals this is the height of the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, which is the answer.
This puzzle was first inspired by wanting to write a Nikoli-style logic puzzle, as we didn't have any of those yet; when I saw that EMPIRE STATE BUILDING was an available answer, Skyscrapers was a natural choice. I imagined Rainbow Dash flying around between buildings as a thematic way to draw out letters, and that eventually turned into the "storm" rule.
I tried constructing with several possible versions of the storm rule before settling on this one - other variations (like only specifying whether any storm was visible, as opposed to the exact number of visible storms) made it too difficult to "force" storm positions to spell out specific letters. Even then, I ran into several issues while constructing - for example, a 1 storm has to be on the edge or else it's essentially impossible to deduce.
Since my extraction method would give 1 character per puzzle, I wanted to minimize the length of the cluephrase, and went back and forth between several options before settling on "1250 FT". It's not perfect (at least for me, you have to scroll down a bit to see the answer when googling), but testsolvers were able to get the answer without much trouble so I stuck with it, and we were able to have the answer checker confirm "1250 FT" was the right cluephrase.
Several of the puzzles changed from their original to final forms. The original Spaciousdale tested way too hard (partially because one of my intended logical steps didn't actually work oops), so I nerfed it quite a bit, though it still ended up as the hardest puzzle (not surprising given that it's a 6x6 grid). The original versions of Crampedsdale and Wordsdale had intended deductions that used the "storm" logic, but testers found they were both unique without even taking the storm rules into account, so I reworked both of them. One of my goals when making this puzzle was to use the variant rule in interesting ways, as opposed to something tacked on at the end for extraction, and I hope I at least somewhat succeeded with the last 3 puzzles.
During the hunt, we were really surprised at all the guesses based on indexing into the city name! In testsolving, we focused on forward-solving every logic puzzle to verify they worked, so we had the full "1250 FT" message before considering the answer. Puzzle solvers are primed to treat small numbers as indices, so until they solve one of the last three puzzles, indexing is a natural idea. Similarly, the ambiguity between 5 vs S and 0 vs O was a bit unfortunate, but it was hard to avoid.
Fun fact: Wordsdale was very difficult to construct so that you needed the storm rule to have a unique solution. I wrote a program to help me with this, which makes it the first time I've ever written code to verify that a logic puzzle was not unique!