The Weather Channel Acquires Weather Underground

Well, that was a unexpected turn by Weather Underground. After surviving 17 years without any help from the other weather companies influencing the results, Weather Underground announced that they will be joining The Weather Channel family, which NBC Universal (a Comcast/GE company) currently owns majority of the company.

This comes after the announcement that NBC Universal announcing that they are acquiring The Weather Channel a few years back. Before NBC Universal owned The Weather Channel, many NBC affiliates had a ability to broadcast a weather orientated digital sub-channel (or another channel on most cable services) in which NBC broadcasted a national weather report and the local NBC stations broadcasted their own local weather reports as well as using a “L-Bar” format to display local temperature and customized weather forecasts for every individual cities the channel is broadcasted. When NBC acquired The Weather Channel, NBC stopped the broadcast of their weather orientated sub-channel. Many stations had held on the service, broadcasting their own local weather service for a few years after the service, though most stations are now broadcasting their own syndicated shows or digital television specialty channels.

Though The Weather Channel is acquiring Weather Underground, both companies said to not worry about the changes saying that acquisition will not affect the services. They said that the acquisition will help enhance Weather Underground services and make it stronger and continue to operate the same, but just that the content will also be on The Weather Channel.  On WUndergound post, Dr. Jeff Masters says that…

The Weather Channel is committed to keeping the Weather Underground brand and the web site in its current form. Weather Underground CEO Alan Steremberg will remain in charge, and our meteorologists and developers will continue to create the ground-breaking weather products that we’re renowned for. The plan is to make both wunderground.com and weather.com stronger, by sharing content and infrastructure. Many Weather Underground features, such as our Personal Weather Station data, WunderMap, and my blog, are scheduled to also appear on the weather.com web site in the coming months. My blog’s main home will continue to be wunderground.com, and I have been asked to continue to write the same variety of science-based posts on hurricanes, extreme weather, and climate change that I’ve provided since 2005. I enjoy communicating weather science, and am pleased I will be able to do this for both wunderground and The Weather Channel, which has an audience about three times as large as wunderground’s.

Hopefully, if the plan comes true, then Weather Underground will continue to improve and not fall into closure.