Reply #2: For those unfamiliar with Jeff Masters

[bananas]

He is the co-founder and Director of Meteorology at "Weather Underground"

About Jeff Masters:

http://www.wunderground.com/about/jmasters.asp

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In 1986, he took a position teaching weather forecasting to undergraduates at SUNY Brockport in New York, then later that year moved to Miami to join the Hurricane Hunters as a flight meteorologist for NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center. You can see him on the 1988 PBS documentary NOVA show titled "Hurricane!", flying into Hurricane Gilbert, the strongest hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic at that time. He co-authored several technical papers on wind measurement from aircraft during his four years flying with the Hurricane Hunters.

After nearly getting killed flying into Hurricane Hugo, Jeff left the Hurricane Hunters in 1990 to pursue a Ph.D. degree in air pollution meteorology from the University of Michigan. His 1997 Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Vertical Transport of Carbon Monoxide by Wintertime Mid-latitude Cyclones." The University of Michigan College of Engineering awarded him their 2006 Merit Award as the Alumnus of the year from their Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences Department, and Jeff remains active with the Department, offering guest lectures on hurricanes, and managing a Weather Underground undergraduate scholarship program.

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About Weather Underground:

http://www.wunderground.com/about/background.asp

The First Internet Weather Service!

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In 1991, while working under the direction of Perry Samson at the University of Michigan, PhD candidate Jeff Masters wrote a menu-based telnet interface which displayed real-time weather information around the world. By 1992, the two servers his system used were rattling off their desks as "um-weather" became the most popular service on the Internet.

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The web site has never stood still and many new features have been added in recent years. Of particular note, Weather Underground has developed the world's largest network of personal weather stations (almost 10,000 stations in the US and over 3,000 across the rest of the world) that provides our site's users with the most localized weather conditions available. Embracing the community aspect of the web, we have developed WunderPhotos, a section where our members upload and share photographs of weather related content; our popular Blogs section allows members to post weather-related blogs in addition to Jeff Masters' widely-read WunderBlog.

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wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(weather_service)

Weather Underground is a commercial weather service that provides real-time weather information via the Internet. Weather Underground provides weather reports for most major cities across the world on its Web site, as well as local weather reports for newspapers and Web sites. Most of its United States information comes from the National Weather Service (NWS), as information from that agency is within the public domain by federal law. The Web site is available in many languages, and an ad-free version of the site with additional features is available for an annual fee.

History

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan's Internet weather database. The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1960s militant radical leftist student group the Weather Underground, which also originated at the University of Michigan.

Jeff Masters, a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Michigan, working under the direction of Professor Perry Samson, wrote a menu-based telnet interface in 1991 that displayed real-time weather information around the world. By 1992, they claim that the two servers they used were the most popular service on the Internet. In 1993 they initiated a project to bring Internet weather into K-12 classrooms.

In 1995 the Weather Underground, Inc. evolved as a commercial entity separate from the university.<1> It has grown to provide weather for print sources, in addition to its online presence. In 2005 the Weather Underground became the weather provider for the Associated Press; WU also provides weather reports for some newspapers (including the San Francisco Chronicle) and the Google search engine.

In October 2008, Jeff Masters reported that the site was #2 in Internet Weather for 2008. <2>

Blog

Blogs are one of the main features in Weather Underground, allowing users of the site to create blogs about weather, everyday life and anything else. Dr. Jeff Masters started the first blog on April 14, 2005,<3> and he now posts blog entries nearly every day.

Products

The Weather Underground also provides an outlet for members having personal weather stations (PWS) to provide weather observation detail to the Internet community.<4> They distribute Internet radio feeds of NOAA Weather Radio stations from across the country, as provided by users. The Associated Press uses Weather Underground to provide national weather summaries.<5>

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