AccuWeather

AccuWeather provides weather forecasts, warnings, data and other weather-related services through its website, app, and TV channel. AccuWeather provides some free services funded by advertising, and generates revenue through a tiered subscription model that unlocks certain features like access to longer-range forecasts and exclusive AccuWeather Alert. In 2019, Forbes estimated annual revenue of $100 million from approximately 1,000 customers, ranging from media to companies such as rail and amusement parks. It operates a 24/7 weather channel, The AccuWeather Network. Their headquarters are near State College, Pennsylvania, where the network's studio and master control facilities are based. AccuWeather employs around 400 people, more than 100 of whom are operational meteorologists. Leadership As of June 2023, Steven R. Smith is the CEO, having taken over the position from company founder Dr. Joel N. Myers, who became executive chair. Joel Myers' brother Evan Myers was the chief operating officer until 2020 ==Products and services==

AccuWeather provides forecasting services to individual consumers, and performs weather-related predictive analytical services for businesses, including Bloomberg Television and United Stations Radio Networks (previously through Westwood One until 2009). It produces local weather videos each day for use on its own website, on the Local AccuWeather Network, on wired Internet, and on its mobile application and websites. and also collects crowd-sourced weather observations. The company is also active in the areas of convergence 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. In 2025, AccuWeather signed a partnership with Perplexity to integrate its weather forecasts and data into Perplexity's AI-powered search platform. Personalities AccuWeather's broadcast meteorologist Jim Kosek attracted attention in 2010 due to what the company described as his "all-out, manic style" announcements, including a blizzard forecast that became known as "snowmaggedon". AccuWeather's Chief Meteorologist is Jonathan Porter. Elliot Abrams retired from AccuWeather in 2019 after more than 50 years with the company. The Local AccuWeather Channel Starting in 2005, AccuWeather offered The Local AccuWeather Channel as a digital subchannel to television stations. In 2021, AccuWeather launched its video streaming service AccuWeatherNOW, which provides 24-hour weather programming. AccuWeather continues to provide local weather content to noncommercial Milwaukee PBS station WMVT-DT3 under a separate agreement. MS NOW, CNBC broadcast In 2025, AccuWeather entered a distribution agreement with Versant Media to make AccuWeather forecasts available on CNBC and MS NOW. 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 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. The AccuWeather Network is also carried on streaming services, including Spectrum TV, DIRECTV, Frontier, Philo, and FuboTV. AccuWeather Now 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. 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 its "FeelsLike" temperature reading. Plume Labs AccuWeather acquired air pollution startup Plume Labs in 2022. Plume Labs started in 2014 as an air pollution visualization and forecasting service using data gathered through government-controlled stations and individual contributors. It later offered street-by-street AQI predictions. It also sold Flow, a pocket-sized device to measure AQI. Due to sales volume, more Flow devices report AQI than government stations. Although government stations report AQI with greater accuracy. After the acquisition, in the spring of 2023, all Flow device sales were suspended. == Criticisms ==

Long-term forecasting practices In April 2012, AccuWeather drastically shortened the range of its 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 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. It is generally accepted that the upper limit for reliable forecasting is between one and two weeks, with a limit based on both limitations in observational systems and the chaotic nature of the atmosphere. 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. 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. 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. 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. The bill did not come up for a vote. Santorum received campaign contributions from AccuWeather's president, Joel Myers. 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. even though he ran AccuWeather as a successful, profitable company for 12 years. 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. Myers sent a letter to The Washington Post in 2019 to address these allegations of sexual harassment, which the company denied. iOS location privacy 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. 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. Lobbying 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. ==See also==