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FORBES.COM JUNE 30, 20 19THETRENDThat is the professional opinion of Joel Myers, the CEO
of AccuWeather, about the weather on Mother’s Day in New
York City, as rain pelts the pavement nonstop and tempera-
tures drop into the 40s. From the corner of 50th Street and
3rd Avenue, he shoots a text to company headquarters inState College, Pennsylvania, suggesting employees use the
word in the day’s New York forecast. “I’m always looking for
ways to make the information we communicate better and
more accurate,” he says.
Wiry and fit at 79 with a full head of dyed brown hair,
Myers runs America’s oldest independent private weather
forecasting company. He founded it in 1962 while studying
for his master’s in meteorology at Penn State. His first cli-
ent, a local gas company, paid him $150 to forecast three
months of winter weather so it could plan for home heating
demand.
Today conservative estimates of AccuWeather’s annual
revenues exceed $100 million. Customers include hundreds
of TV and radio stations across the country plus major print
outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and
USA Today. More than 1,000 companies use Accuweather’s
private weather forecasts to improve their bottom lines.
Those range from the obvious—railroads and amusement
parks like Six Flags—to the less obvious—say, Clemson Uni-
versity’s campus police department and Starbucks.
In all, the business could be worth as much as $900 mil-
lion, and Joel owns more than half of it, with the rest split
among company executives and employees, including his
youngest brother, Evan, who serves as COO. Joel’s other
brother, Barry, who was AccuWeather’s CEO until Janu-
ary, recently sold his small stake for $16 million after being
nominated in 2017 by President Trump to head the $5.4 bil-
lion (2019 budget) National Oceanic & Atmospheric Admin-
istration (NOAA).
For decades, private weather forecasting has been a cozy
industry, dominated in the U.S. by AccuWeather, the Weath-
er Company (founded as the Weather Channel in 1982 and
bought by IBM for $2.3 billion in 2016) and DTN, which fo-
cuses on industrial concerns and was purchased by a Swiss
holding company for $900 million last year.
But now a perfect storm of macro-trends—ever cheaper
processing power, cloud computing, vastly improved AI and“Nasty.”
ClimaCell
Founded: 2015 by CEO Shimon Elkabetz
Hyperlocal forecasts using data from cellphone towers and
street cameras
Number of employees: 100
Money raised: $77 million“WHAT WE’RE DOING IS
REVOLUTIONARY. WE’RE
CHANGING THE PARADIGM.”