AccuWeather

About AccuWeather

AccuWeather is one of the world's largest commercial weather forecasting companies, a private media and data business headquartered in Ferguson Township, near State College, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1962 by Penn State graduate student Joel N. Myers, AccuWeather provides weather forecasts, warnings, data, and related services to media outlets, businesses, and government agencies around the globe, while its consumer website, mobile apps, and 24/7 television channel — the AccuWeather Network — reach an audience the company measures in the billions. The firm employs more than 400 people, including over 100 operational meteorologists, and serves some 1,950 media companies along with thousands of businesses, including 245 of the Fortune 500.

Founding by a Graduate Student

AccuWeather's origin story is a classic American business tale. Joel Myers, a native of Philadelphia who had kept a daily weather diary since age seven and submitted weather observations to a Philadelphia television meteorologist by age fifteen, came to Pennsylvania State University to study meteorology, earning his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees there in 1961, 1963, and 1971. In 1962, while a second-year graduate student, he founded a private weather forecasting service with a single client. His first customers were a natural gas company and a ski resort, both businesses for whom winter weather forecasts had direct financial value. Myers later said he saw the venture as a way to earn money while providing a genuinely useful service — and he believed there was a place for accurate, commercially oriented forecasting alongside the free forecasts of the U.S. Weather Bureau. The company adopted the name "Accu-Weather" in 1964, later restyled as AccuWeather.

Early Growth and Innovation

In its early years AccuWeather focused on winter weather forecasts for clients such as highway departments, utility companies, construction companies, and ski resorts — customers whose operations and budgets depended on knowing what the weather would do. In 1971 the company expanded to year-round forecasting, and in 1975 it introduced the industry's first 7-day local forecast for television, a product that became a staple of TV weather segments. Myers recruited bright meteorology graduates, many of them fellow Penn State alumni — the university's meteorology program became a pipeline of talent for the company, and Myers himself taught forecasting at Penn State from 1964 to 1981, estimating that he had trained roughly 17 percent of all practicing meteorologists in the United States by the time he retired from teaching. The company's growth was steady: by the late 1980s it could claim 27 continuous years of expansion, driven by proprietary forecasting techniques and a growing roster of media clients.

Services for Media Outlets

Supplying forecasts to the news media has always been central to AccuWeather's business and is the reason it functions as a news service for the industry. The company provides weather content to radio stations, television stations, and newspapers — some 1,950 media companies in total, according to the company's figures. Television stations receive customized forecast graphics and video segments; radio stations get audio forecasts; newspapers receive forecast text and data. AccuWeather also historically supplied forecasts to wire services, with its data at one point flowing to Reuters terminals around the world. For local media outlets that cannot afford a full meteorology staff, AccuWeather's forecasts are the weather report their audiences see and hear, making the company an invisible but essential part of the American local news ecosystem.

Consumer Products: Website, Apps, and TV

Alongside its business-to-business services, AccuWeather built one of the most visited weather destinations on the internet. Accuweather.com offers free forecasts funded by advertising, while a tiered subscription model unlocks additional features such as longer-range forecasts and exclusive severe weather alerts. The company's smartphone apps are among the most downloaded weather apps in the world. In 2015 the company launched the AccuWeather Network, a 24/7 weather television channel carried by cable, satellite, and streaming providers, with its studio and master control facilities based at the company's headquarters near State College. The network's programming combines live forecasting with weather news and long-form features. The company also developed proprietary consumer-facing forecast products, most famously the RealFeel Temperature, which expresses how temperature actually feels accounting for factors beyond the thermometer reading.

Global Reach

What began as a one-client graduate-student venture now operates on a global scale. AccuWeather maintains offices in New York City and Wichita, Kansas, in the United States, and internationally in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, and Mumbai. The company says its forecasts reach nearly 2 billion people worldwide. Its business customers span industries where weather is a operational variable: energy and utilities, transportation and rail, retail, agriculture, construction, insurance, and amusement parks. Forbes estimated in 2019 that the company's annual revenue exceeded $100 million from roughly 1,000 customers. The international offices support localized forecasting and business development in Asia's major markets, where demand for commercial weather intelligence has grown rapidly.

Leadership: The Myers Family

AccuWeather has remained a family-led private company. Founder Joel Myers guided the company for more than six decades; in 2007 he appointed his younger brother Barry Lee Myers, a business attorney, as chief executive officer. Barry Myers later became a figure of national controversy when President Donald Trump nominated him in October 2017 to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; he ultimately departed AccuWeather in 2019. Joel Myers then returned as CEO before stepping down in June 2023 to become founder and executive chair, with Steven R. Smith taking over as chief executive officer. Joel Myers' other brother, Evan Myers, served as chief operating officer until 2020. Joel Myers has also been a major Penn State benefactor — funding the Joel N. Myers Weather Center, scholarships, and campus sculptures — and received the university's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016. In 2018 the American Meteorological Society honored him for outstanding contributions to applied meteorology.

Controversies

AccuWeather's relationship with the public weather establishment has been contentious at times. The company has lobbied the U.S. government to curtail free public weather services and opposed legislation that would prevent the National Weather Service from offering products that compete with the private sector — positions critics characterize as an effort to privatize weather data that taxpayers already fund. The nomination of Barry Myers to lead NOAA intensified scrutiny of these issues, with critics questioning whether a private weather executive should oversee the public agency whose free data underpins his industry. AccuWeather has also faced disputes with rivals over forecast accuracy claims and marketing. These controversies are part of a decades-long debate over the proper boundary between public weather services and the commercial forecasting industry that AccuWeather helped create.

Severe Weather and Public Safety

One of AccuWeather's most emphasized missions is severe weather warning. The company issues its own severe weather alerts to subscribers and enterprise clients, sometimes ahead of official National Weather Service warnings, and its television network provides continuous coverage during major storms, hurricanes, and tornado outbreaks. The company argues that its investment in forecasting technology and its direct-to-consumer alerting save lives and protect property. Its enterprise services include site-specific warnings for businesses, allowing companies to trigger safety protocols based on precise, location-targeted forecasts rather than county-wide alerts.

Visit AccuWeather Online

Consumers can check forecasts, download apps, and explore premium subscription options at the official website, accuweather.com. Businesses and media outlets seeking forecasting data, severe weather services, and content licensing can find enterprise information there as well, along with details about the AccuWeather Network's television programming.