Some reading this may know that I have been contributing weather data from my local weather station to the Weather Underground site—Marysville, KS forecast—since early 2005. Yesterday I, along with, presumably, many other weather station owners received the following email:
Dear Weather Station Owner,
As an invaluable member of our Personal Weather Station (PWS) community, I wanted you to be the first to know that Weather Underground, Inc. has become part of The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC). Your weather station data will remain an integral part of our forecast modelling, and we expect that the combined forecast technologies of the two companies will enable us to provide even more accurate custom forecasts for your station. The service that we provide PWS owners on wunderground.com will remain unchanged for now, and will only be improved in the long term.
With the increased audience reach that our union with TWCC provides, we hope to considerably expand our PWS community to further enhance the quality of our weather forecasts. With extra resources at our disposal, we will also be able to provide a greater level of support for our community members.
As always, we thank you for being part of our PWS network, and greatly appreciate all of the data you share with us. You can read my latest blog post for more information about the sale of wunderground to TWCC.
Kind regards,
Dr. Jeff Masters Director of Meteorology
Well, that was quite a shock! Now, I am not a fan of The Weather Channel at all. Their TV broadcast is many times bordering on irresponsible and the Anthropological Global Warming agenda they push is well known and, I believe, a fraud being perpetrated on western civilization.
I found this blog entry from Weather Underground meteorologist Shaun Tanner and posted the following comment in response:
I have been contributing weather data since early 2005 when I put my weather station online. I am not one bit pleased to hear that Wunderground will be subsumed by TWC. I have enjoyed Wunderground’s independence and have enjoyed being a contributor, at least until I received the email yesterday.
I find TWC/NBC push an agenda that I disagree with and cannot in good conscience provide them with my weather data for free—zero cost to them. At some point I will shut down this feed which is the only one in this area and provided solely at my expense because I enjoy it. Whether I self host a weather page or find another site that I feel comfortable contributing to, I have not decided which I will do at this time.
Sadly, I have seen this sort of thing occur too many times to think that Wunderground will retain its former independence as a part of TWC. What I see is another media company thinking they’re going to get a bunch of new eyeballs to sell to and a whole bunch of free weather data. Well, from this person they won’t.
– Nate
As I wrote, I don’t yet know where I will be posting data from personal weather station. Whether I take the time to write up a page and then set up a database for the data on this site or find another site remains to be seen.
Stay tuned.