The Trump administration is undermining the collection and distribution of essential weather and climate information, right before hurricane
In the early 1990s, a University of Michigan graduate student named Jeff Masters started working on an internet weather project to share real-time weather information and satellite imagery, something most people take for granted today but was at the time revolutionary. That project was Weather Underground, which claims the honorific of being the “Internet’s 1st weather service.” It had a mission to “make quality weather information available to every person on this planet,” and promised to “provide weather data for those that are underserved by other weather providers.” Although it started as a service for universities and K-12 educators, Weather Underground became a commercial product in 1995, and for a time had more daily page views than the Weather Channel, which acquired the site in 2012.
More than three decades have passed since Weather Underground’s humble beginnings, and Masters left the company in 2019, but he can still rattle off the tools and software that he used to build the site. These include WXP, McIDAS, and LDM, all of which were provided by Unidata, a program started in the 1980s to share meteorological and atmospheric data between universities and to improve access for researchers and educators. To a layperson, these acronyms likely mean very little, but their general purpose is neatly conveyed in the name “Unidata”: a one-stop shop of universal tools for the distribution and management of data, specifically Earth and atmospheric data.
“Our little weather project was completely impossible without Unidata,” Masters told the Bulletin.
