After 17 years of aggregating data from Personal Weather Stations as an independent company, Weather Underground has been acquired by the Weather Channel.

Some  reactions…

Slate.com
“Whether  [The Weather Channel] will entirely replace its own forecasts with Weather Underground’s BestForecast is not immediately clear. The predicitions are often substantially different. Right now, for instance, Weather.com is predicting that it will be 93 degrees in my part of New York on the Fourth of July, while Weather Underground says 99.”

nytimes.com
“In an interview, David Kenny,  the chairman and chief executive of the Weather Channel Companies, praised the Weather Underground site for having a “hard-core audience” of passionate weather fans. Some of them, he admitted, have sour views of the Weather Channel, which they see as overly corporate and dependent on advertising.”

TechCrunch
” This deal will put Weather Underground’s awesome technology to use on a much bigger stage, bringing better information to a large number of people…”

This just received in the SPWS inbox:

Dear SP Weather Station Flux Factory,

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