accuweather

AccuWeather is a large American company that provides weather forecasting services. It was founded in 1962 by Dr. Joel N. Myers, then a Penn State graduate student working on degrees in meteorology, who was forecasting weather for a gas company in Pennsylvania. The company became officially known under the name "AccuWeather" in 1971. As well as running the company, Myers became a member of the school's faculty and taught many meteorologists, and AccuWeather is still headquartered in State College, Pennsylvania, the home of the Pennsylvania State University, with a satellite sales office in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.

AccuWeather has been a vocal critic of the National Weather Service (NWS), a part of the U.S. government's NOAA, because the NWS provides free weather forecasting services to the general public. AccuWeather argues that the government thus competes with them directly and unfairly, and on April 14, 2005 senator Rick Santorum introduced the "National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005" to the U.S. Senate that would prohibit the NWS from providing products or services that the private sector is willing and able to provide (S. 786). The bill did not come up for a vote in the 2005 session.

AccuWeather provides national weather updates on WSVN's FOX AccuWeather Channel, WFMZ-TV's Accu Weather Channel, WABC-TV's "Eyewitness News Now", and WLS-TV's "ABC 7 News Now". The first three are actual channels while the latter is a web-only streaming weather channel. Local weather updates by the stations are also provided every 15 minutes. The format of these channels is similar to NBC Weather Plus. AccuWeather also provides weather for numerous radio stations and newspapers, and some of its broadcast meteorologists such as Joe Bastardi and Elliot Abrams are known nationally.

They also provide online forecasts from AccuWeather.com, featuring long-term forecasts out to fifteen days, and their data powers the Weather widget in Apple Computer's Dashboard software and the Forecastfox extension for Mozilla Firefox.

Many of AccuWeather's forecasts replace the commonly cited wind chill and heat index values with a unified value known as RealFeel [1]. The formula for calculating this value is proprietary to AccuWeather, though the company has said that it will release details on the formula once it is patented.

See also

• Joe Bastardi

External links

• AccuWeather website
• "National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005"
• "AccuWeather on Santorum Bill"
  
• "Santorum's Mighty Wind" Slate.com article