AccuWeather Celebrates 60th Anniversary

Since its founding in 1962, AccuWeather has become the most used source for weather forecasts and warnings in the world. On Sept. 22, the company marked 60 years of innovation and achievement with a celebration at its Global Weather Center headquarters in State College.

CEO Joel Myers founded AccuWeather while he was a meteorology graduate student at Penn State, where he went on two earn three degrees and teach a generation of meteorologists as a faculty member for nearly two decades.

“I had a burning desire to be a weather forecaster, and I wanted to combine this dream with my burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit,” Myers said in a press release. “As a teenager, I wanted to raise the respect for weather forecasters and meteorologists overall. In those days, forecasts were the butt of jokes and cartoons, ‘It is the only job you can get paid for to be regularly wrong.’ Today, when we forecast a snowstorm or a hurricane, people act on it and do what is necessary to get ready.”

The 60th anniversary celebration welcomed elected officials, leaders in the meteorology field, AccuWeather staff and clients and other guests. Among those offering remarks and words of praise were National Weather Service Director Ken Graham, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, Gov. Tom Wolf and Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi.

Myers and AccuWeather have developed thousands of innovations throughout the company’s history. AccuWeather MinuteCast, the patented AccuWeather RealFeel Temperature and the AccuWeather RealImpact Scale for Hurricanes are a few tools the company has introduced to improve safety, convenience and comfort.  Earlier this year, AccuWeather released AccuWeather Alerts advanced notifications to provide better, clearer and more concise notifications when severe weather threatens to complement official government warnings.

AccuWeather’s work has benefited numerous long-lasting business clients and media outlets that have used the company’s forecasts, including a recently celebrated 50-year relationship with Channel 6abc Action News in Philadelphia.The American Meteorological Society has bestowed more awards on AccuWeather than any other commercial weather company and Congress has cited the company for its accurate and life-saving warnings.

“In our 60 years, AccuWeather has certainly become a global brand and trusted source for accurate, actionable and, when needed, life-saving information,” said Steven R. Smith, AccuWeather President, who began as a forecasting intern in 1997. “With extreme weather events increasingly impacting more humans around the world, there is a growing need for increased advanced notice and accuracy. No other weather source is better than AccuWeather at weather forecasting due to our unique forecasting philosophy that has been honed and refined for six decades.”