A deadly hurricane slams into the Gulf Coast, toppling trees with 130 mile-per-hour winds, forcing entire cities to evacuate and leaving millions without power in its wake.
It's the kind of week that coastal dwellers dread and weather websites thrive on.
Amid a remarkably destructive season for hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, weather forecasting sites are enjoying a record-breaking year for user traffic and advertising revenues.
"This is the time that we were made for," said Joe Fiveash, general manager of Weather.com, the online arm of cable television's The Weather Channel, which sent out a team of weather trackers equipped with satellite phones and digital cameras to capture the wrath of Hurricane Ivan. The site, ranked by web measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings as the most visited online weather destination, logged an eye-popping 70 million pageviews on Wednesday alone, as Ivan prepared to wreak havoc on the Gulf Coast.
Of late, weather sites have been drawing more users than the most popular general news sites. Fiveash finds that top news sites get more traffic when political or military issues dominate the headlines, such as during the initial stage of the war in Iraq. But when Mother Nature is making news, it's weather websites who rule in the pageview wars.
During the month of August, when Hurricane Charley hit the now storm-weary western coast of Florida, 39 percent of workplace internet users and 21 percent of home users looked at weather content online, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Year-over-year, traffic to weather sites rose sharply as well, with both Weather.com and WeatherBug, the two top online weather providers, increasing their readers by close to 30 percent.
"With the internet it's available at the snap of a finger, whereas on TV you have to wait around," said Kaizad Gotla, internet analyst with Nielsen//NetRatings, of online forecasting. He attributes much of the rise in online weather monitoring to people signing up or downloading desktop applications for services that give personalized forecasts by zip code.
As the higher rate of broadband penetration makes it easier for users to view satellite imagery and other graphics-laden weather information, competition is heating up among forecasting sites to distinguish themselves from the pack. Nearly all are pushing applications to personalize forecasts, both for users and advertisers.
Weather.com, which launched in 1995, boasts that its affiliation with The Weather Channel and its staff of more than 100 meteorologists enables it to provide deeper analysis of public weather data. The website, with a staff of about 150, also provides forecasts for specific activities like golf, skiing or sailing.
But it's severe weather that really gets staff at Atlanta-based website revved up, said Fiveash, who presided over the Hurricane Ivan coverage.
"We had a guy at three in the morning sticking his cell phone out the window so people could hear what the wind sounds like as a Category IV hurricane hit," he said. The site also upped its page-serving capacity to handle the flood of storm-related traffic.
At WeatherBug, founded in 1993 and based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the main source of data is a network of 7,000 weather stations the company installed at schools across the country. People who download WeatherBug's software get information about current neighborhood weather, forecasts, severe weather alerts and other news streamed to their PCs.
A relative newcomer to the internet forecasting business, 4-year-old MyWeather.net of Madison, Wisconsin, offers personalized forecasts delivered to subscribers' e-mail inboxes. The company, a spin-off of Weather Central, which makes weather graphics and animations for broadcasters, signs up subscribers through partnerships with local television stations and other media outlets.
Fans of satellite imagery often go directly to the source, theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is currently tracking tropical storms Jeanne and Karl, as well as Ivan.
"It's been off the charts for us," said Greg Hernandez, online editor for the NOAA website, regarding traffic volumes. In the first nine days of September, traffic to the site matched levels that last year took about four months to reach.
For commercial weather sites, public demand for forecasts is translating into an easy sell to advertisers. Sites are pitching ads linked to individual ZIP codes, seasonal weather patterns, or even that day's forecast.
"We can not only say it's going to rain this week, but it's raining at ZIP code 30327 right now," said Fiveash. He says a popular option for advertisers is to correlate ads with temperatures, pitching, for example, a cool drink on an insufferably hot day in Phoenix, Arizona.
Pete Celano, vice president of marketing for WeatherBug, uses a similar sales approach. Advertisers can pick a particular place, age group and even weather condition under which they prefer to pitch their product. In one case, Celano recalls, a movie studio advertised a film only in places where it was raining that weekend.
So far, however, advertisers have shied away from hurricane-specific promotions.
"It would probably be inappropriate to do, say, plywood during a hurricane," Celano said.
Becaues the top weather sites are privately held, little data is available showing the extent to which such advertising strategies have paid off. Weather.com, a division of newspaper publisher Landmark Communications, said it has been profitable for the past two years. Fiveash said revenues, which come mostly from advertising but also from content syndication and subscriptions, are up 65 percent this year compared to the same period last year.
Part of that growth reflects an overall rise in Internet ad spending this year. However, there's no denying that bad weather has been very good for business. Even if autumn and winter prove tamer by comparison, sites are hoping that the recent scourge of storms will sustain public interest in updated forecasts.
"Severe weather is often the inducement for a user to sign up for one of our services," said Matt Peterson, president of MyWeather. "But what really sustains them is when they make the transition from concern about severe weather to ongoing usage."
For this winter, forecasters don't have any firm predictions for weather trends. One phenomenon they have tracked, said Ray Ban, vice president of meteorology science and strategy at The Weather Channel and Weather.com, is a mild warming in ocean temperatures in the South Pacific, otherwise known as the El Niño effect. Whether that will translate into extreme temperatures or precipitation levels along the West Coast, however, is anyone's guess.
"The fact is we're dealing with a massive Earth system and we only measure it like the pimple on the proverbial butt," he said. "Just predicting where known storms are going is a huge challenge. It's really early to begin to think about what the upcoming winter's going to bring."
