Weathering the Storm

In a way, the Weather Channel was just waiting for an interactive medium like the Web to come along. Its customers were already dying to interact. They regularly called or wrote to ask questions about the weather (What causes a low-pressure system?); about the meteorologists delivering the weather (Which hurricane was the most memorable to John Hope -- and could I get an autographed picture of him?); and about minutia behind the broadcast (What was the background music that you played this morning?).

Today, the majority of those questions come to weather.com. Besides fast track, there's a link called "Talk to Us." And although weather.com can't provide each query with a unique response, it can answer questions promptly, thanks to its automated system. "Having that system is part of the conversation that we carry on with our users," says Wilson. "That is just really important to us. I think it further cements their loyalty."

As with the feedback messages, customer-service representatives categorize meteorological questions and then generate an automated response that offers an answer. Weather.com already has most of the answers in its database -- because at one time or another, Jenny Dean, 44, has fielded the question. A former meteorologist at the Weather Channel, one of the original weather.com employees, and now the HTML team leader, Dean used to personally answer weather questions that were sent in by users. She says that she settled many a bet between spouses as well as among bar patrons. To avoid duplicating her research and retyping the same replies, she saved her explanations. Fortunately, Dean says, some questions only come around once. Like one that asked if communities construct phony trailer parks to divert tornadoes. (Considering that she lived in a trailer at the time, she was not amused.) Or one that asked whether it is safe to have sex on a waterbed during a storm. (She declined to dignify that one with a reply.) "People ask questions that you would never think of," she says, shaking her head.

Technology: What Comes After Doppler Radar?

Because the weather is always changing, it may seem ideal for a real-time medium such as the Web. But coping with those changes is incredibly demanding from a technical standpoint. Just like fluctuating stock prices, the temperature has a short shelf life. Actually, it's even more perishable -- because weather doesn't take nights or weekends off. Because it isn't humanly possible to update the conditions and the forecasts for 77,000 different places around the world on an hourly basis, weather.com relies on cutting-edge technology. "We're one of the most automated sites on the Web," says Walrath.

Every 5 minutes, a new Doppler-radar image arrives in the system and gets cut into 157 local images. Every 15 minutes, a U.S. satellite image arrives and is cut into 10 regional slices. And every hour, the latest parameters for temperature, precipitation, and other current conditions arrive, giving a snapshot of the atmosphere at thousands of different points around the world. The current observations get updated, and if they're different than what were previously forecast, the 12-hour forecast takes the new information into account and adjusts accordingly. Within minutes of arriving, most of the new data has been processed, analyzed, and packaged for the appropriate destination, whether it's a PalmPilot or a city page on the Web site. "The Internet environment changed the whole paradigm," says Ian Miller, 46, VP of weather-systems development at the Weather Channel. Whereas the Weather Channel broadcasts one view of the weather at a time, weather.com broadcasts as many different views simultaneously as users request. Because of the data necessary to produce more detailed profiles of more locations, says Miller, "We're going through a weather-information revolution."

The engineers and architects at weather.com have mastered most of those technical challenges. But here's the key to their innovative environment: They act as if they've mastered nothing. "When you focus on the customer, you're never satisfied," says Wilson. "There's always something that you can improve."

Of course, there's improvement -- and then there's radical improvement. Despite weather.com's dominance among online weather-content providers, the company has reinvented nearly every phase of its operation over the past couple of years: how it assembles weather data and generates forecasts; the type of products it offers and how they get built; and how those products get delivered to the various platforms. The result is a faster, more efficient overall operation. Walrath estimates that the staff completed 12 months' worth of projects this year in just 6 months. "Over the past four years, we've gone from being a weather company to being a technology company that operates more like a software company," he says.