History of Weather on the Internet
From CASI's Using The Internet Section. By Jesse Ferrell.

The Internet is a wonderful place. Without it, CASI would not be here. And the Internet is a wonderful place for weather. Weather is the second most popular word on the Internet, falling only slightly behind... well, you can imagine what.* There are so many hits for the word 'weather' that the search engines may outlaw the word because of its breadth, as some have done for the word "news."

When I crawled onto the Internet in 1991, there were no web sites at all. There was still weather, though, and I can remember the joy that was mine when a friend helped me ftp a weather map from UIUC's site to a DOS PC and open it up with a DOS image viewer. I knew then that I was destined to surf the Net for weather forever.

At that time, there were such a small number of weather sites that they could all be fit onto a couple pages of paper, maintained at that time in an email list and posted occasionally to newsgroups (of which there were near 1000 at that time, in 1998 there were over 35000). Sometime in 1992 I had ftp'd to all the ftp sites, read all the mailing list archives, and was active on the most useful newsgroups. I thought "this Internet thing is great, but I've been to all the good stuff on it."

Then came Gopher. I remember how abuzz people were when Gopher came out in 1993 - it was to be the new thing, to overtake the world! You would use a command line application to 'gopher' to a Gopher Site and read information by descending through text menus. You can still see the original gopher site online today if your browser supports the gopher:// protocol (Netscape does as of 4.0). Most of the data on Gopher was text data, but there were also images, but they were difficult to download unless your machine was properly configured. Even if you could download them it was likely you would have to move them to another machine to view them. The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (see below) started out with a Gopher service, which was a well known way to access text weather data on the Internet until 1997 when it was shut down.

Computers didn't abound then like they do now - in 1993 if you had a computer in your dorm room you were one of the few. Most of my weather reading on the Internet during 1991-3 occurred on the school's VAX mainframe system at dumb terminals that could not download data and were monochrome (one-colored). Everything was text at the time anyway so that worked out pretty well. In my sophomore year at UNCA, in 1993, I was thrilled to own a 25-lb monochrome laptop with no hard drive (but two floppy drives). I hooked the parallel port to an external 2400 baud modem (modern modems work at approx. 56K (56,000) baud) which I paid $150 for, and I could connect to the text world of the Internet from the privacy of my own dorm room. I thought that I was set.

Then came the Web. Before I was comfortable with having gone through all the Gopher sites, the web exploded and killed the Gopher. At first the web was all grey backgrounds, left-aligned text, and GIF images. It could only be viewed by the Mosaic browser on high end workstations. Fortunately enough I hung around with my Internet-enabled friend as he had access to the high-end computer lab, and he showed me the Web in early 1994. In late 1994 a few private companies started opening their storefronts on the World Wide Web, and by 1996 the flurry of personal pages turned into a snowstorm.

The only significant websites for weather online in late 1994 were University sites. The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had the contest during those years with a large collection of radar, satellite, forecast model, and other imagery. A few examples can be seen below. he WXP site at Purdue (now defunct and moved to UNISYS) soon followed, along with smaller sites such as Ohio-State, etc. UIUC remained the premier weather site on the Internet until early 1995 when a computer crash resulted in the current weather portion of the web site shutting down (except for the Weather Visualizer, an early Interactive Weather site). After years of delays and missed launches, it finally reopened its doors in April 1999 as "Weather World 2010".

There were few significant other weather sites on the Web at that time, two of which were WeatherNet (on the web in 1994), a collection of weather links by Michael McDonald of the University of Michigan, and Intellicast, (on the web in 1995) a site providing delayed satellite and detailed delayed radar information. WeatherNet was quite useful back then, which was before the advent of most modern search engines (I remember only Webcrawler at the time). After the advent of search engines and a million pages listing weather links, Mike had to insert some of the university's data to stay above the water. Although updated infrequently now, WeatherNet, now called WeatherNex for legal reasons, remains one of the most linked-to sites on the Internet today. Intellicast proved to be a very good move for WSI Corporation, who held the website static for a couple years then added more content in 1997-8. It is the most linked to private weather company today, despite measures taken by its programmers in 1997 to keep people from linking directly to images (which decreased their revenue from advertisements), a practice which was picked up by AccuWeather in 1998.

Other websites followed, and today there are almost 10,000,000 pages* on the Internet containing the word "weather."

What was I doing back then? Although my initial interest with the Web was for cheesy homepages (I'm sure I've got a copy of the horror around somewhere of my first home page in 1994, but haven't been able to locate it) I soon realized that I could go above and beyond this by providing weather data on the Web Server for the University of North Carolina - Asheville (where I was earning my degree in Meteorology at the time). In late 1994 I hooked up the new UNIX McIDAS weather display system to the web and began outputting mesoscale analyses (see example below). Combining this with informational university pages and static educational content (including a Cloud Catalog with student-submitted photos which were scanned (mainly mine and Tim's) made the UNCA-ATMS site quite a hit on the Internet. UNCA-ATMS still has a (very nicely designed) site today, though the weather image output was not picked up where I left off and eventually was discontinued. During the same time I composed and updated "J's Weather Pages," which was essentially an early version of a one-man CASI. The pages still exist today but have not been updated in several years. It included the first weather-realted VRML module on the web - 3-D Thunderstorm in VRML. The links inside the VRML module no longer work and the module can only be viewed with a VRML 1.0 compliant browser.

After graduating from UNCA in May 1995, I came to miss the close interaction with other weather nuts that I had experienced at the University. In late 1996, on a dare from a friend, I started accepting membership applications for CASI, then known as the Carolina Area Storm Investigators. Just over 2 years and 500 Members later, CASI has established itself as the premier (free) Weather Organization on the web.

Examples of early weather images on the Internet follow. I will tell you now that I had to do some serious digging through dusty collections of floppys to find these images. I may have older ones that I can't find at this time, if I do I will post them here.

1. Radar Image - July 20, 1993 - UIUC Gopher?

I'm guessing that came from the UIUC Gopher as the web wasn't active at that time in 1993. This was the only type of radar data that meteorologists had to work with on a US scale - NEXRAD had yet to be implemented across the country. This blocky data was all we had - but we liked it anyway. This is a Manually Digitized Coded Radar Image. These types of images can still be obtained today.

2. Satellite Image - Feb. 10, 1994 - UIUC Web Site

Believe it or not, this was the only satellite image available for the US at the time (there were some zooms available of course but I mean this projection) - GOES 7 I believe. GOES 8 , 9 ,or 10 hadn't even been conceived yet.

3. 6-Panel Surface Image- Feb 19, 1994 - UIUC Website

This was a really cool 6-panel surface chart (they also had forecast versions of this and mpeg animations (remember GIF animation wasn't invented until 1996)). Since UIUC's current weather section has been discontinued this image is no longer made. Too bad, it was a very attractive quick-look image.

4. NEXRAD Radar Composite- April 21, 1995 - WSI Intellicast Website

This is the earliest image from Intellicast that I could find. Amazingly, it doesn't look much different from their modern-day product, except a few small changes to the color table and a different header at the top.

5. Floater Zoom Satellite With Temp Analysis and Streamlines- May 31, 1995 UNC-Asheville

This is an example of the really neat stuff that I had on the UNCA server for a short amount of time. I had analyses like these along with Mesoscale analyses of the North Carolina area (not unlike some of the stuff that UNCC puts out these days). There were a lot of problems getting the UNIX McIDAS workstation to automate the products, which I didn't have time to figure out before graduation and the project was then dropped.

6. 3-D US Surface Pressure- August 11, 1995 - University of Hawaii

This was a really cool product (I thought anyway) that was done hourly by the University of Hawaii. They took the US Pressure analysis and applied it to warp a flat map of the US. It was great when hurricanes came near the SE Coast you can bet! The product was discontinued in late 1996.

© 1999 Central Atlantic Storm Investigators