AccuWeather

Company profile

AccuWeather markets weather products and services, with 175,559 clients worldwide in media, business and government. It also runs the free, advertising-supported website AccuWeather.com, an online weather provider. Third-party web analytics providers Alexa and SimilarWeb rated the site as the 200th most visited website in the United States, as of November 2015.

AccuWeather's forecasts and services are based on weather information derived from numerous sources, including weather observations and data gathered by the National Weather Service and meteorological organizations outside the United States, and from information provided by non-meteorological organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the armed forces. AccuWeather employs 404 people, of whom 113 are meteorologists. AccuWeather operates a 24-hour commercially sponsored weather channel known as The Local AccuWeather Channel, which is similar to the now defunct NBC Weather Plus. The Local AccuWeather Channel launched in 2006 and is currently on the air in 56 markets including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Houston.

Leadership

Joel N. Myers, the founder of AccuWeather, serves as president of the firm and chairman of the board. His brother Barry Lee Myers became the chief executive officer in 2007, and his other brother, Evan Myers, serves as Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President.

Products and services

The regular weather provider for Bloomberg Television and numerous local TV stations, AccuWeather also provides guest commentary on major TV networks. AccuWeather, through the United Stations Radio Networks (previously through Westwood One until 2009), also provides weather for numerous radio stations and newspapers, including WINS (AM) in New York City, KFWB (AM) in Los Angeles and WBZ (AM) in Boston. During severe-weather episodes, AccuWeather experts have been called upon by television journalists such as Larry King, Geraldo Rivera, and Greta van Susteren for expert commentary. Many of its broadcast meteorologists, such as Elliot Abrams, are known nationally.

AccuWeather produces local weather videos each day for use on their own web site, on the Local AccuWeather Channel, on wired Internet and mobile application and web sites. The company is also active in the areas of convergence and digital signage. They have added a user-contributed video section to their photo gallery.

Besides its forecasting services to individual consumers, AccuWeather performs weather-related predictive analytical services for businesses, such as determining how weather conditions have influenced past sales history and advising businesses on adapting their sales strategy for future weather events.

National weather channel

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 Channel 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.

RealFeel temperature

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 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, 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.

Long-term forecasting practices

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 worse than simple predictions based on National Weather Service averages over a 30-year period. 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. An informal assessment conducted by Jason Samenow at The Washington Post asserted that AccuWeather's forecasts at the 25-day range were often wrong by as many as ten degrees, 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. 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, but this contrasts with the way the forecasts are presented. 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 to be useless.

National Weather Service

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.

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. The bill did not come up for a vote. Santorum received campaign contributions from AccuWeather's president, Joel Myers.