“It seemed with every update to their Web site, added another obstacle” with advertisements and extra tabs and clicks, he said. Paul Baginski, a visiting assistant professor of mathematics at Smith College, said that when he assigned his students to run their hometown temperature data through a series of calculus functions, he pointed them toward Weather Underground instead of because it was so much easier to track down historical data on the independent site. Tucker called the Weather Underground site “simple and somewhat elegant” by comparison. I don’t really care about all that stuff. In a telephone interview, he said: “I’m looking at the site right now, and it’s laden with ads, and promotional things for their shows. Tucker, the “Nooooooooooooooooo!” response was a reaction to what he sees as the Weather Channel’s penchant for the commercialization of weather. In other words, as he put it on Facebook, “I liked that Wunderground was indy and for weather geeks and not so much ‘normies.’ ”įor Mr. Maxwell said he appreciated Weather Underground’s fanatical devotion to data, and how it drew information from so many thousands of weather stations run by users that he is able to determine “microclimates” of variation that can prove important in getting the most out of a new solar installation. The name was a winking reference to the radical group that also had its roots in Ann Arbor. Weather Underground was founded in 1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online weather database. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.

Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp.

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal: “Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data. The announcement on Monday that the Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the nation.

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