Madison companies tailor forecasts to your address
10:58 PM 10/20/03
Marv Balousek Business reporter

One of the latest trends in weather forecasting is a friendly e-mail from WKOW (Ch. 27) weatherman Bob Lindmeier reminding you to bring your umbrella tomorrow because it will be raining outside your front door. <

It sounds personal and simple. Instead, it's automated and based on complex weather modeling formulas developed at UW-Madison's atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. <

Television stations have invested millions trying to out-Doppler each other on their weather broadcasts. Now, the competition is shifting to the Internet where more-detailed and personalized forecasts are possible. <

Two Madison companies are competing on Internet weather forecasting's national stage. One is Weather Connections, a small dot-com startup company that offers Weather Depot software. The other is Myweather, a subsidiary of Weather Central Inc., a successful broadcast weather graphics and forecasting company founded by Terry Kelly, a former Madison TV weatherman. <

Myweather offers personalized forecasting through the Web sites of television stations that subscribe to the service, one of which is WKOW. WISC (Ch. 3) has a similar service on its Web site called My-Cast from a Minneapolis company. WMTV (Ch. 15) provides current weather conditions for many area locations in connection with the WeatherBug program offered by AWS/WeatherNet of Gaithersburg, Md. <

Weather Central generates weather pages for many daily newspapers including The Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The Wisconsin State Journal uses Accuweather, a competing service in State College, Penn. <

Despite the number of companies involved in weather forecasting, most of the data they use comes from a single source - the National Weather Service. <

Former TV weatherman Grant Brohm of Weather Connections said the company launched its Weather Depot software a couple months ago after operating a travel forecasting Web site. The basic software is free and a premium version costs $29.95. <

"We've tried to create a little more sophisticated application and we've tried to use some of our television knowledge to do it," he said. "We believe we've got some real meaningful information." <

Brohm and his partner, Brett Wilt, who both worked at Weather Central for several years, are minority owners of Myweather, and it and Weather Connections use the same forecasting programs. Under an agreement with Kelly, Weather Connections is restricted from selling its software to television stations. <

Current weather modeling can produce computer-generated forecasts that can be tailored to a specific location. Besides atmospheric data provided by the National Weather Service, other information is incorporated, such as topographic features. <

Gregory Tripoli, a meteorology professor at UW-Madison, said local topography is included to help create very specific forecasts. The effect of a northwest wind crossing Lake Mendota, for example, makes a forecast for Madison's Isthmus different than one for Middleton. <

Tripoli said the Internet provides an effective way of delivering forecasts that are more localized than television or newspapers. The weather modeling programs can tailor the forecasts to a specific address. <

"The new challenge of modern meteorology is that we have so much information, we don't know how to disseminate it to the public," he said. <

Tripoli said weather modeling programs also are self-correcting. If a forecast proves to be wrong, he said, the program tracks the data backwards and makes adjustments so the same mistake won't happen again. <

More powerful computers probably will make forecasting more accurate, but Tripoli said there are limits to the technology. <

"I don't think we're ever going to be able to say exactly where the tornado's going to be or if there's going to be a tornado," he said. "That's only predictable within a few minutes." <