Weather Underground (weather service)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Weather Underground is a commercial weather service which provides free, real-time weather information via the Internet. Weather Underground provides extensive weather reports for most major cities in the world on its website, as well as local weather reports for newspapers and websites. It is a strong supporter of the National Weather Service, from which it gets much of its domestic weather data. The website is available in many languages, and an ad-free version of the site with enhanced and additional features is available for a small annual fee.

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan's popular Internet weather database. The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1960s militant radical communist student group The Weather Underground, which also originated at the University of Michigan.

Jeff Masters, a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Michigan, working under the direction of Professor Perry Samson, wrote a menu-based telnet interface in 1991, which displayed real-time weather information around the world. By 1992, the two servers that they used became the most popular service on the Internet at that time. In 1993 they initiated a project to bring Internet weather into K-12 classrooms.

In late spring of 1995, the Weather Underground, Inc. evolved as a separate commercial entity from the university. It has grown to provide weather for print sources as well as online. In 2005 Weather Underground became the weather provider for Associated Press; WU also provides weather reports for some newspapers (including the San Francisco Chronicle) and the Google search engine.

Weather Underground Logo

Blogs are one of the main features in Weather Underground, allowing users of the site to create a blog/handle about everyday life, weather and anything else that comes into their minds. Dr. Jeff Masters started the first blog on the April 14, 2005, and he is now posting blogs every week because it was a success.