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AccuWeather

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Not to be confused with AccuRadio.

AccuWeather, Inc.
Company typePrivate
IndustryMeteorology
GenreWeather forecasting
Founded1962; 63 years ago (1962)
FounderJoel Myers
Headquarters
Ferguson Township, near State College, Pennsylvania
,
United States
Key people
Joel Myers (executive chairman)
Steven Smith (CEO)
Services
  • Smartphone weather applications
  • Online forecasts and videos
Number of employees
500+[1]
Websiteaccuweather.com

AccuWeather, Inc. is a private-sector American media company that provides commercial weather forecasting services. AccuWeather was founded in 1962 by Joel N. Myers. The company adopted the name 'AccuWeather' in 1971.

AccuWeather is headquartered in Ferguson Township, just outside of State College, Pennsylvania, with offices at 80 Pine Street in Manhattan's Financial District in addition to Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Internationally, AccuWeather has offices in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, and Mumbai.

The business model of the company is to take statistics and weather data compiled by federal agencies and federal government satellites and sell it to users in a more user-friendly, consumable format.[2][3] AccuWeather has lobbied the US government to stop providing services for free to the public and to privatize the National Weather Service, thus enabling AccuWeather to provide those services at a charge instead.[2][4]

Company profile

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AccuWeather Forecast Center, 2007

AccuWeather provides weather forecasts, warnings, data and a handful of other weather-related services. The company is best known for the eponymous website, app, and TV channel. AccuWeather provides some free services funded by advertisements, and some revenue is generated through a tiered subscription model which unlocks certain features.

In 2024, AccuWeather employed around 400 people, more than 100 of whom are operational meteorologists.[5]

AccuWeather operates a 24/7 weather channel, The AccuWeather Network. The network's studio and master control facilities are based at their headquarters near State College, Pennsylvania.[6]

Leadership

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As of June 2023, Steven R. Smith is CEO having taken over the position from company founder Dr. Joel N. Myers who became executive chairman.[7] Joel Myers' brother Evan Myers was Chief Operating Officer until 2020[8] and Senior Vice President. His other brother, Barry Lee Myers, was chief executive officer from 2007 to January 1, 2019.[9]

Products and services

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The AccuWeather app on Android

AccuWather provides weather information for Bloomberg Television and United Stations Radio Networks (previously through Westwood One until 2009). AccuWeather's broadcast meteorologist Jim Kosek became an internet sensation in 2010 due to what the company describe as his "all-out, manic style" announcements, e.g. of a blizzard forecast as a "snowmaggedon".[10] AccuWeather's Chief Meteorologist is Jonathan Porter. Elliot Abrams retired from AccuWeather in 2019 after working at AccuWeather for more than 50 years.[11]

AccuWeather produces local weather videos each day for use on their own website, on the Local AccuWeather Network, on wired Internet, and on mobile application and websites.[12] The mobile application has a minute-by-minute forecast[13] and also collects crowd-sourced weather observations.[14] The company is also active in the areas of convergence[12] and digital signage.[15] They have added a user-contributed video section to their photo gallery.

In 2015, AccuWeather entered into a joint venture with the Chinese company Huafeng Media Group, receiving the sole rights to deliver forecasts made by the China Meteorological Administration, a government agency that controls Huafeng.[16]

Besides its forecasting services to individual consumers, AccuWeather performs weather-related predictive analytical services for businesses.[17]

The Local AccuWeather Channel

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On-air with a behind-the-scenes view of the production.

Starting in 2005, AccuWeather offered The Local AccuWeather Channel as a digital subchannel to television stations.[18] By 2021, the service had been quietly discontinued.[19] AccuWeather continues to provide local weather content to noncommercial Milwaukee PBS station WMVT-DT3 under a separate agreement.[20]

National weather channel

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In 2015, Verizon FiOS replaced The Weather Channel with a new 24/7 all-weather television network called "The AccuWeather Channel". This followed earlier negotiations among AccuWeather, The Weather Channel, and DirecTV. The AccuWeather Network is a separate operation from "The Local AccuWeather Channel", which continues to run in selected markets across the country. It became the third 24/7 weather network to launch on American television, after The Weather Channel in 1982 and WeatherNation TV in 2011.[21] The AccuWeather Network is also carried on Spectrum TV, DIRECTV, Frontier, and on Philo and FuboTV streaming services. On August 1, 2018, the AccuWeather Network began on DIRECTV nationwide.

AccuWeather Now

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In July 2021, AccuWeather announced a companion over-the-top channel, AccuWeather Now, that will focus mainly on viral videos and shared social media content.[19]

RealFeel temperature

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AccuWeather created a unified and proprietary apparent temperature system known as "The AccuWeather Exclusive RealFeel Temperature" and has used the quantity in its forecasts and observations. The formula for calculating this value[22] incorporates the effects of temperature, wind, humidity, sunshine intensity, cloudiness, precipitation, and elevation on the human body, similar to the rarely used (but public domain) wet-bulb globe temperature. AccuWeather has been granted a United States patent on The RealFeel Temperature,[23] but the formula is a trade secret and has not been reviewed by other meteorological authorities. In response to AccuWeather's "RealFeel", The Weather Channel introduced their "FeelsLike" temperature reading.[24]

Plume labs

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AccuWeather acquired air pollution startup Plume Labs in 2022.[25] Plume labs started in 2014, as an air pollution visualization and forecasting service. Data is gathered through government controlled stations and individual contributors.[26] It gradually started offering street by street level prediction of AQI. It also sells Flow, a pocket-sized device to measure AQI.[27] Due to sales volume, more Flow devices report AQI than government stations. Although government stations report AQI with greater accuracy.

After the acquisition, in spring of 2023, all Flow device sales were suspended.[28]

Criticisms

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Long-term forecasting practices

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In April 2012, AccuWeather drastically shortened the range of their publicly available historical data from 15 years to 1 year. They also began increasing the range of their forecast from 15 days to 25 days, 45 days, and (by 2016) to 90 days. These hyper-extended forecasts have been compared to actual results several times and shown to be misleading, inaccurate, and sometimes less accurate than simple predictions based on National Weather Service averages over a 30-year period.[8][29] It is generally accepted that the upper limit on how far one can reliably forecast is between one and two weeks, a limit based on both limits in observation systems and the chaotic nature of the atmosphere.[8][30][31]

An informal assessment conducted by Jason Samenow in 2013 at The Washington Post asserted that AccuWeather's forecasts at the 25-day range were often wrong by as many as ten degrees Fahrenheit, no better than random chance and that the forecasts missed half of the fourteen days of rain that had occurred during the month of the assessment.[32] AccuWeather responds that it does not claim absolute precision in such extremely long forecasts and advises users to only use the forecast to observe general trends in the forecast period,[33] but this contrasts with the way the forecasts are presented.[34] An assessment from the Post determined that the 45-day forecasts were not even able to predict trends accurately, and that, although the forecasts did not decrease in accuracy with time, the forecasts were so far off even in the short range as to be useless.[34] The Post commissioned another assessment from Penn State University professor Jon Nese, comparing several more cities to AccuWeather's predictions; that assessment, while acknowledged as being limited to a single season, acknowledged that AccuWeather's forecasts were of value in short-range forecasting while also noting that their long-range forecasts beyond one week were less accurate than climatological averages.[29]

National Weather Service

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The National Weather Service, which provides large amounts of the data that AccuWeather repackages and sells for profit, also provides that same information for free by placing it in the public domain. AccuWeather said NOAA foundational weather data is one of 190 sources that AccuWeather uses as inputs into our proprietary and patented Forecast Engine (SWIFT), which also uses AI, 250 patents, the expertise of more than 100 meteorologists, and over 60 years of intellectual capital to generate our forecasts and warnings.[35]

On April 14, 2005, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced the "National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005" in the U.S. Senate. The legislation would have forbidden the National Weather Service from providing any such information directly to the public, and the legislation was generally interpreted as an attempt by AccuWeather to profit off of taxpayer-funded weather research by forcing its delivery through private channels. AccuWeather denies this and maintains it never intended to keep weather information out of the hands of the general public.[36] The bill did not come up for a vote. Santorum received campaign contributions from AccuWeather's president, Joel Myers.[37] AccuWeather maintains that it does not agree with the view, and AccuWeather has not suggested, that the National Weather Service (NWS) should fully commercialize its operations. [35]

On October 12, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated AccuWeather CEO Barry Lee Myers, the younger brother of the company's founder, to head the National Weather Service's parent administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was noted that unlike 11 of the previous 12 NOAA administrators, Myers lacks an advanced scientific degree, instead holding bachelor's and master's degrees in business and law[38] even though he ran AccuWeather as a successful, profitable company for 12 years.[39] Barry Myers stepped down as CEO of AccuWeather on January 1, 2019, and completely divested himself of any ownership of AccuWeather in accordance with his pledge to the Office of Government Ethics and the U.S. Senate. After two years of inaction on the nomination, Myers withdrew his consideration for nomination on November 12, 2019, due to ill health.[40] Myers sent a letter to The Washington Post in 2019 to address these allegations of sexual harassment, which the company denied.[41]

iOS location privacy

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In August 2017, security researcher Will Strafach intercepted traffic from the AccuWeather iPhone app to discover that it inadvertently sent location information to Reveal Mobile through a faulty SDK, even when customers have not given permission to share location information. ZDnet independently verified this information.[42] AccuWeather stated that it did not know the app was tracking location information without users' consent and that it did not use the data in any way and released an update to the App Store which removed the Reveal Mobile SDK.[43]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Careers". AccuWeather. Retrieved January 14, 2023.
  2. ^ a b Green, Miranda (October 14, 2017). "Trump's pick to lead NOAA pushed for privatizing weather data | CNN Politics". CNN.
  3. ^ Schlanger, Zoë (July 16, 2024). "The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports". The Atlantic.
  4. ^ Freedman, Andrew (November 25, 2019). "Weather is turning into big business. And that could be trouble for the public". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286.
  5. ^ "About Us". AccuWeather. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
  6. ^ "National Weather". The Hollywood Reporter. November 5, 2017.
  7. ^ "AccuWeather names new CEO after founder Joel Myers steps down to become executive chairman". Centre Daily Times. June 14, 2023.
  8. ^ a b c Samenow, Jason (April 11, 2016). "AccuWeather extends its controversial, 45-day weather forecasts to 90 days". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved April 14, 2016.
  9. ^ Feintzeig, Rachel (March 20, 2014), "Meet the Man Who Brings You the Weather", The Wall Street Journal, retrieved November 18, 2016
  10. ^ Athas, Eric. "AccuWeather forecaster Jim Kosek's over-the-top antics make him a Web sensation". The Washington Post.
  11. ^ Vadala, Nick (February 28, 2019). "Longtime AccuWeather meteorologist Elliot Abrams, a Philly native, to retire this week". www.inquirer.com. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  12. ^ a b "Firm Expands Ways to Get Weather – Technology". redOrbit. December 3, 2006. Retrieved November 20, 2011.
  13. ^ Moynihan, Tim (February 26, 2014), "AccuWeather's Revamped App Is the Perfect Blend of Utility and Beauty", WIRED, retrieved April 9, 2017
  14. ^ Swanner, Nate (July 21, 2015). "AccuWeather's AccUcast service is like Waze for weather". The Next Web B.V. Retrieved April 9, 2017.
  15. ^ "CORRECTION: Content From AccuWeather to Expand to Digital Signs – Business". redOrbit. August 11, 2006. Retrieved November 20, 2011.
  16. ^ Dodillet, Lauren (May 28, 2015). "JV Brings AccuWeather Tech to China". China Business Review. US China Business Council. Retrieved April 9, 2017.
  17. ^ Davis, Jessica (November 23, 2015), "AccuWeather Storms Into Enterprise With Predictive Analytics", InformationWeek, retrieved November 18, 2016
  18. ^ McAvoy, Kim (July 27, 2011). "Diginets Struggle For Place On TV's Frontier". TVNewsCheck. Retrieved August 19, 2014.
  19. ^ a b "AccuWeather to Launch Video Streaming Service AccuWeather NOW". AccuWeather. July 29, 2021 – via PR Newswire.
  20. ^ OnMedia: How to audition for "Idol", OnMilwaukee.com, July 14, 2010.
  21. ^ "Verizon FiOS drops the Weather Channel". Los Angeles Times. March 11, 2015. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  22. ^ "What is the AccuWeather RealFeel Temperature?". Accuweather. June 17, 2014. Archived from the original on November 30, 2019. Retrieved January 13, 2021.
  23. ^ "United States Patent: 7251579". Patft.uspto.gov. Archived from the original on December 8, 2016. Retrieved November 20, 2011.
  24. ^ Carpenter, Mackenzie (January 25, 2014). "Have we become emotionally obsessed with the weather?". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved February 11, 2014.
  25. ^ Dillet, Romain (January 24, 2022). "AccuWeather acquires air pollution startup Plume Labs". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 16, 2024.
  26. ^ "Plume Labs: Air Report to dodge the smog and find clean air | Copernicus". atmosphere.copernicus.eu. Retrieved May 16, 2024.
  27. ^ Dillet, Romain (January 4, 2017). "Plume Labs' Flow is an air quality tracker to avoid pollution". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 16, 2024.
  28. ^ "Flow, by Plume Labs: The first smart air quality tracker". plumelabs.com. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  29. ^ a b Nese, Jon (December 26, 2013). "Students put AccuWeather long-range forecasts to the test". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved April 14, 2016.
  30. ^ Paul, Don (June 10, 2016). The Farmers' Almanac, long-range forecasts and other 'gibberish' Archived June 13, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. The Buffalo News. Retrieved June 12, 2016.
  31. ^ "Chaos in the Atmosphere". www.aip.org. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved April 14, 2016.
  32. ^ Samenow, Jason (August 6, 2013). Accuweather: You cannot be serious. The Washington Post. Retrieved August 7, 2013.
  33. ^ "AccuWeather unveils 45-day forecast – DC News FOX 5 DC WTTG". August 25, 2013. Archived from the original on August 25, 2013. Retrieved April 14, 2016.
  34. ^ a b Mesereau, Dennis (October 8, 2013). AccuWeather’s 45-day forecast fails to impress in multi-city test. The Washington Post. Retrieved October 11, 2013.
  35. ^ a b "AccuWeather Does Not Support Project 2025 Plan to Fully Commercializing NWS Operations; NOAA has Critical Role in American Weather Enterprise". July 10, 2024.
  36. ^ "Weather info could go dark". Archived from the original on May 17, 2007.
  37. ^ "NEWSMEAT ▷ Joel Myers's Federal Campaign Contribution Report". Newsmeat.com. Archived from the original on October 20, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.
  38. ^ Shepardson, David (October 12, 2017). "White House nominates AccuWeather CEO to head climate agency". Reuters. Retrieved October 12, 2017.
  39. ^ "Barry Lee Myers Steps Down from AccuWeather". www.accuweather.com.
  40. ^ Freedman, Andrew; Samenow, Jason (November 20, 2019). "White House pick to lead NOAA withdraws nomination, citing health concerns". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved December 3, 2019.
  41. ^ Hesson, Ted (April 15, 2019). "Harassment allegations at AccuWeather". POLITICO.
  42. ^ "ZDnet ▷ AccuWeather caught sending user location data, even when location sharing is off". ZDnet.com. Retrieved August 22, 2018.
  43. ^ Shaikh, Rafia (August 24, 2017). "AccuWeather Releases Updated App to Deal with Privacy Concerns". Wccftech. WCCF PTE LTD.

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