The Michigan Atmospheric Deposition Laboratory in the Space Research Building. (Jeff Masters)
In the early days of the internet, U-M student Jeff Masters and Perry Samson, his College of Engineering professor, developed an idea to bring real-time weather information to our daily lives through an online resource that would come to be known as Weather Underground. It all started in 1991 with Hurricane Bob and a single Sun 4/110 workstation in the Space Research Building on North Campus taking live satellite data from the National Weather Service. The system organized that data into a simple, menu-based program and made it available to everyone on the growing internet. This real-time weather resource, referred to as UM-WEATHER, was the first of its kind, and not many people knew about it. It had barely 100 weekly users when it started, but with Hurricane Bob approaching, word of mouth boosted weekly usage to 25,000, with no slowdown in sight. The growth of UM-WEATHER would continue through 1995, when it would join the World Wide Web and eventually become the widely popular weather website Weather Underground, which is still in use today.
