AccuWeather

Leadership

As of June 2023, Steven R. Smith is the CEO, having succeeded company founder Dr. Joel N. Myers, who became executive chair.^[8] Joel Myers' brother Evan Myers was the chief operating officer until 2020^[9] and Senior Vice President. His other brother, Barry Lee Myers, was the chief executive officer from 2007 to January 1, 2019.^[10]

Personalities

AccuWeather's broadcast meteorologist Jim Kosek attracted attention in 2010 due to what the company described as his "all-out, manic style" announcements, including a blizzard forecast that became known as "snowmaggedon".^[21] AccuWeather's Chief Meteorologist is Jonathan Porter. Elliot Abrams retired from AccuWeather in 2019 after more than 50 years with the company.^[22]

The Local AccuWeather Channel

Starting in 2005, AccuWeather offered The Local AccuWeather Channel as a digital subchannel to television stations.^[23] In 2021, AccuWeather launched its video streaming service AccuWeatherNOW, which provides 24-hour weather programming.^[24] AccuWeather continues to provide local weather content to noncommercial Milwaukee PBS station WMVT-DT3 under a separate agreement.^{[until when?][25]}

MS NOW, CNBC broadcast

In 2025, AccuWeather entered a distribution agreement with Versant Media to make AccuWeather forecasts available on CNBC and MS NOW.^[26]

National weather channel

In 2015, Verizon FiOS replaced The Weather Channel with a new 24/7 all-weather television network called "The AccuWeather Channel". This followed earlier negotiations among AccuWeather, The Weather Channel, and DirecTV. The AccuWeather Network is a separate operation from "The Local AccuWeather Channel", which continues to run in selected markets across the country. It became the third 24/7 weather network to launch on American television, after The Weather Channel in 1982 and WeatherNation TV in 2011.^[27] The AccuWeather Network is also carried on streaming services, including Spectrum TV, DIRECTV, Frontier, Philo, and FuboTV.

AccuWeather Now

In July 2021, AccuWeather announced a companion over-the-top channel, AccuWeather Now, that will focus mainly on viral videos and shared social media content.^[24]

RealFeel temperature

AccuWeather created a unified and proprietary apparent temperature system known as "The AccuWeather Exclusive RealFeel Temperature" and has used it in its forecasts and observations. The formula for calculating this value^[28] incorporates the effects of temperature, wind, humidity, sunshine intensity, cloudiness, precipitation, and elevation on the human body, similar to the rarely used (but public domain) wet-bulb globe temperature. AccuWeather has been granted a United States patent on The RealFeel Temperature,^[29] but the formula is a trade secret and has not been reviewed by other meteorological authorities. In response to AccuWeather's "RealFeel", The Weather Channel introduced its "FeelsLike" temperature reading.^[30]

Plume Labs

AccuWeather acquired air pollution startup Plume Labs in 2022.^[31] Plume Labs started in 2014 as an air pollution visualization and forecasting service using data gathered through government-controlled stations and individual contributors.^[32] It later offered street-by-street AQI predictions. It also sold Flow, a pocket-sized device to measure AQI,^[33] though less accurately than government stations. A community of users was set up to build pollution maps; the large number of Flow devices sold generated more reports than the smaller number of government stations.

Sales of Flow devices were discontinued in the spring of 2023.^[34][35]

Long-term forecasting practices

In April 2012, AccuWeather increased the range of their forecast to 90 days. AccuWeather's critics have questioned the practice of disseminating long-range forecasts, saying they are no better at predicting the weather than averaging historical conditions.^[36][9] It is generally accepted that the upper limit for reliable forecasting is between one and two weeks, due to limitations in observational systems and the chaotic nature of the atmosphere—the butterfly effect.^[9][37][38]

An informal assessment conducted by Jason Samenow in 2013 at The Washington Post concluded that AccuWeather's temperature forecasts at the 25-day range were often wrong by as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit.^[39] AccuWeather responded that it did not claim absolute precision in such extremely long forecasts, and advised users to use the forecast only to observe general trends in the forecast period.^[40][41] The Post commissioned another assessment from Penn State University professor Jon Nese, comparing AccuWeather's predictions for several cities to actual weather. It was assessed that, for the single season considered, AccuWeather's forecasts were of value in short-range forecasting, but noting that forecasts for more than one week were less accurate than climatological averages.^[42]

National Weather Service

The National Weather Service provides publicly-funded information for use without charge by the public by placing it in the public domain. AccuWeather repackages and sells for profit large amounts of this data. AccuWeather stated that "NOAA foundational weather data is one of 190 sources that AccuWeather uses as inputs into our proprietary and patented Forecast Engine (SWIFT), which also uses AI, 250 patents, the expertise of more than 100 meteorologists, and over 60 years of intellectual capital to generate our forecasts and warnings."^[43]

On April 14, 2005, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), who received campaign contributions from AccuWeather's president, Joel Myers,^[44] introduced the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005 in the U.S. Senate. The legislation would have forbidden the National Weather Service from providing weather information directly to the public; it was generally interpreted as an attempt by AccuWeather to profit from taxpayer-funded weather research by restricting its delivery to paid private channels. AccuWeather said that it never intended to deny public access to weather information,^[45] and that it had not suggested that the National Weather Service (NWS) should fully commercialize its operations.^[43]The bill did not come up for a vote.

On October 12, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated AccuWeather CEO Barry Lee Myers, the younger brother of the company's founder, to head the National Weather Service's parent administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was noted that, unlike eleven of the previous twelve NOAA administrators, Myers did not have an advanced scientific degree, instead holding bachelor's and master's degrees in business and law.^[46] He had run AccuWeather as a successful, profitable company for twelve years.^[47] Barry Myers stepped down as CEO of AccuWeather on January 1, 2019, and completely divested himself of any ownership of AccuWeather in accordance with his pledge to the Office of Government Ethics and the U.S. Senate. After two years of inaction on the nomination, Myers withdrew his consideration for nomination on November 12, 2019, due to ill health.^[48] Myers sent a letter to The Washington Post in 2019 to address these^[which?] allegations of sexual harassment, which the company denied.^[49]

iOS location privacy

In August 2017, security researcher Will Strafach intercepted traffic from the AccuWeather iPhone app to discover that it inadvertently sent location information to Reveal Mobile through a faulty SDK, even when customers have not given permission to share location information. ZDnet independently verified this information.^[50] AccuWeather stated that it did not know the app was tracking location information without users' consent and that it did not use the data in any way and released an update to the App Store which removed the Reveal Mobile SDK.^[51]

Lobbying

AccuWeather has lobbied the US government to stop providing services for free to the public and to privatize the National Weather Service, thus enabling AccuWeather to provide those services at a charge instead.^[2][4]