By Jesse Ferrell, Founder

What Is WeatherMatrix?

WeatherMatrix is a worldwide organization of over 10,000 online amateur and professional weather enthusiasts -- meteorologists, storm chasers and spotters, and weather observers from all parts of the globe.

As of July 1, 2005, WeatherMatrix is part of AccuWeather, Inc. Jesse Ferrell, the WeatherMatrix founder, still administrates WeatherMatrix. See the announcement regarding this change.

Members trade weather data via e-mail lists and the website, and help maintain external links on WeatherMatrix.Net. The website serves as a database of WeatherMatrix Members, their interests, and contact information, which fosters local communication between Members.

The History Of The Organization

The roots of WeatherMatrix can be traced back to my college days at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. As early as 1991, I began to actively pursue and investigate storms locally -- thunderstorms, hurricanes, snowstorms, whatever was happening in North Carolina. In 1995 I started documenting my trips with my first videocamera (now serving as WeatherMatrix WeatherCam #1). I also worked on the website for the Atmospheric Sciences Department and immediately fell in love with the Web and the systems that drove it.

In the summer of 1996, a year after graduating with a BS in Meteorology (Weather Forecasting), I began to miss the meteorological interaction that I had with the other students at the university. While working at an ISP doing web development, at the urging of a friend, I put up a webpage on the server of the company who I worked for at the time, called the Carolina Area Storm Investigators. At that time it was just a collection of my storm investigations on my own weather website (still available on an old site, yikes!) -- see the first webified storm report by me or a list of early reports. But in January 1997 I launched weatherwatchers.org and invited like-minded people to join me in creating an online community of local storm investigators. Before I knew it I was buried under applications, obtaining several hundred the first year, mostly from the Carolinas.

In July 1997 I moved to Pennsylvania and felt obligated to change the name, but kept the well-known-and-indexed-on-search-engines acronym CASI. At that time we became known as the Central Atlantic Storm Investigators. We started out with most of our members coming from the Central Atlantic states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.

After the turn of the millenium, it became clear that CASI was moving to a worldwide membership -- we had several hundred international members and membership in every state, though because of our beginnings and population distribution, we maintained a high East Coast presence. I began to think of a new name and purpose for the group. A friend of mine thought of the term "WeatherMatrix" in Fall 2000 and it stuck (see below for more on the name).

After becoming a family man in 2000, my time for CASI work decreased. Still, I plugged on and on May 30, 2001, the new WeatherMatrix site was launched.

In 2005, after running out of time and money to support the organization, I handed control over to AccuWeather, Inc. I am now the Director of Community for AccuWeather, Inc., and I continue to administer WeatherMatrix.

--Jesse Ferrell, WeatherMatrix Founder

What Does WeatherMatrix Mean?

A friend of mine thought of the term "WeatherMatrix" in Fall 2000 and it stuck. The movie "The Matrix" had come out the year before, and that's probably what people think I named the site after. Ironically, that is probably what made my friend invent the term.

In reality, the term Matrix was coined in the 1984 by Science Fiction writer William Gibson. "The Matrix" was a global information network, which is what WeatherMatrix is -- a global information network of weather enthusiasts. I had read some Gibson in my cyberpunk days of the early 1990's so I was familiar with the term. He actually envisioned the Net in 3-D, as many people did in those days. That fell short, of course, but I have tried to represent some of that idea in the art that you see with the various WeatherMatrix logos.

One of the reasons I was so interested in the name was because the domain names weren't taken - the biggest struggle of forming and branding a new company name these days is making sure that the domain name is not already registered. This "new term" presented a unique opportunity to build a strong brand for our organization.