A collection of personal stories and memories from the individuals that worked at The Weather Channel in its start-up days of the early 1980s; among these Weather Channel Pioneers, special focus is given to the leadership and vision of the channel's early champions John Coleman and Joe D'Aleo.

A history of weather forecasting, and an animated portrait of the nineteenth-century pioneers who made it possible By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition. Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind—combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason—that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.

Frank Batten Sr. (1927-2009) created the Weather Channel in 1982, despite mocking by colleagues in the media that around-the-clock weather broadcasts would be as exciting as watching paint dry. The network, and later its companion website, Weather.com, became the largest private weather company in the world and an American cultural icon. Yet few have heard of Batten, a media pioneer whose Virginia newspaper was the only major daily to back school integration. At a time when American corporate greed was making headlines, without fanfare and limelight Batten built a media empire centered on honesty, integrity, and ethics. Starting out in his uncle's newspaper business in Norfolk, Virginia, as a reporter and advertising salesman, he assumed leadership of the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star at the age of twenty-seven and grew Landmark Communications into a media powerhouse. He championed racial equality, a position not often taken in Virginia during the 1950s. His flagship newspaper, the Pilot, was the only daily paper in Virginia to back court-ordered school desegregation. He created two billion-dollar businesses and gave away more than $400 million to charity, nearly all of it to education. As chairman of the Associated Press from 1982 to 1987, he helped guide the news agency back on a sound financial footing. Batten also faced a tremendous personal challenge that would have sidelined many: he lost his vocal cords to cancer two years before starting the Weather Channel. This is the untold story of a man whose name few recognize, yet who helped change the face of the media in the twentieth century.

The author profiles real tornadoes and severe weather patterns over six thousand miles of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, known as Tornado Alley.

From the heart of tornado alley, Smith takes us into the eye of America's most devastating storms and behind the scenes of some of the world's most renowned scientific institutions to uncover the relationship between mankind and the weather.

Batten, a retired chairman and CEO of the private media company that owns The Weather Channel, tells the story of a cable network that succeeded despite the dire predictions of experts, offering a glimpse of the world of high-stakes entrepreneurship and a case study of a media business experiencing and driving major change. Color photos are included. Cruikshank has written numerous business books. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

"Bel and her cousin, Dylan, explore the topic of thunderstorms, learning about thunder, lightning, and how they are formed"--