Tom Churchill (March 4, 1961) was a native of Dubuque, Iowa, where he started in radio as on-air weatherman at WDBQ-AM Radio at the age of 13 in August 1974.[1]
Churchill gained notoriety for reportedly being more accurate than the National Weather Service.[2][3] As a 14-year old, he appeared on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. An appearance on the television game show The $128,000 Question earned Churchill $16,000 in 1976.[4]
[5] In 1979, Churchill formed his first weather forecasting company providing live weather forecasts to radio stations across the United States. In the late 1980s he invented the Digital Weatherman system, an automated system that provides audio weather forecasts. It was first marketed to radio stations in 1986 and is now used by hundreds of radio stations and cable systems across the United States.
This method of providing weather information to listeners allows many broadcasters to provide 24 hour coverage of severe weather events and current conditions without employing full time staff. Based on a personal computer, the system contains 30,000 small audio cuts of every possible weather condition or bulletin information that can be spoken. The PC reads text forecast information and uses this to merge audio cuts, known as domain specific synthesis, into a complete weather forecast based on the radio station's preferences.
The system's audio library contains different voices and languages. This allows users to instantaneously create forecasts and bulletins in Spanish, for example, directly from English-language text. The first automated Spanish language weather bulletins using this method aired in 1997 on KANS-FM in Emporia, Kansas.