Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies

[thegreatdr]

How I grew up with weather, and how TWC fits in...

Back when I discovered TWC on cable in time for the 1983 hurricane season, I thought it was the best thing ever. No commercials and weather 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a tropical weather outlook at +:25 with either John Hope or Glenn Schwartz. Local conditions every five minutes. I discovered A.M. Weather in 1985, and was thrilled: a fifteen minute weather show on PBS right around the time I went to school. What could be better! I got a TV and VCR and recorded Tropical Outlooks every 3-6 hours to get all the issued advisory information and recorded the AM Weather broadcasts and watch them all when I got home from school. Yeah, I liked them both. A lot.

When Viewtron (I believe that was its name) got going (an early form of the internet for TV), I thought it would replace the Weather Channel. But no, it was gone in a year (I guess no one else liked the idea of its monthly subscription fee in 1986). I also discovered NOAA weather radio (this is during the decade before the digital voices), which for my purposes in southern FL (hourly observations and TC advisories) beat the Weather Channel hands down. At that point, TWC became very ad-laden, including hidden ones on segments such as "Weather and Your Cheese", "Weather and Your Ceiling Fan", and "Celebrate with Weather and Your Toilet!" (not their real names, but it's how I referred to those segments). They were funny, but still, the handwriting was on the wall that the ship was going down. Rats were fleeing the TWC ship as well. That's when they gained the new on-air mets of Vivian Brown and Cheryl Lempke (sp?) who talked to their audience like they were 5 years old, as well as much discussion of Jackson, Mississippi. At least their "new" guy Jim Cantore showed water vapor satellite imagery from time to time, which was new to me. By 1987, I only watched them for landfalling TCs for developing TCs near land. During Gilbert, it became must-see TV as they all butchered the spanish language prior to its Yucatan peninsula landfall. Oh, the unintentional humor of it all.

Soon, Bill Schubert was no longer on air waxing about Panama City Beach. By 1990, once I got to FSU, the weather wire eclipsed everything else, then when the gopher system/internet came around in 1993 which allowed you to download a satellite image in ONLY 20 minutes and get TC advisories globally, I stopped watching TWC almost altogether. They lost "good ol' Atlantic gale" Charlie Neumann (reference to Hurricane Grace) by 1992. I would see if John Hope was doing the Tropical Outlook, by then around +:50, and if not, would turn it off. By 1995, I was in the NWS permanently, and by 1996, we had the internet at work. No need for any of that anymore. Soon, they started airing all their weather shows about the past which preempted important current weather. That sealed the deal.

I hope TWC doesn't ruin the Weather Underground like they slowly degraded their channel. I submit weather observations to them as well, since 2001. If so, I'll find another avenue to get the obs the U.S. Mesonet.