METEOROLOGY
On the Moscow television show Naked Truth, Russians watch topless women demonstrate the breadth of their meteorological knowledge. Here in America, Web sites are keen to show off their ... satellites.
Those spirits in the sky have become all the rage on the Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com). "We installed a satellite that lets you zoom into your own neighborhood," says Jeff Masters, cofounder and director of meteorology of the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based site. "It takes you within a kilometer of where you live." Not to be outdone, rival Intellicast.com added a similar satellite feature several weeks later.
The Weather Underground isn't the biggest weather watcher on the block; The Weather Channel-owned weather.com boasts nearly five times the pageviews. But Wunderground.com has carved out a niche among serious weather geeks by going deeper with climate and astronomical info. Delivering real-time weather conditions, forecasts, and storm warnings worldwide (courtesy the National Weather Service), Wunderground.com offers its services in more than 50 languages, including Turkish and Esperanto.
The site features an astronomy link that lets users punch in a zip code to locate the position of stars and planets, then chart their motion, and find rising-and-setting information. Users can comb through a six-year log of daily weather conditions - rainfall, humidity, wind speed, and maximum and minimum temperatures - for many cities. WunderSearch, the site's search engine, based on an algorithm developed by Google.com, sorts more than a billion hyperlinks on the Web.
Masters, who holds a PhD in meteorology from the University of Michigan, launched the site in 1995 with three partners, including Wunderground president Alan Steremberg. Masters and Steremberg created some of the earliest real-time weather sites, such as Blue-Skies in the early '90s. (See "Data Storm," Wired 3.01, page 39.)
The company, which is named for the group of '60s radicals from Ann Arbor, has drawn fans from some unlikely quarters. "A couple of Weather Underground members contacted us, and at first we were kind of nervous," Masters said. "But they just called to tell us that they liked the site."
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