They Follow the Weather, Where Things Always Change

Bobbi Meyer is explaining her pending divorce. Religious faith was a factor. Something to do with values. Emotions that change over time. And then there was the Weather Channel.

Bobbi Meyer watches the Weather Channel. A lot. For hours at a time. Sometimes all day. And sometimes, after all of the kids--the 10 of them--are in bed, all night. She is, as the folks at the Weather Channel put it, Weather Involved.

“My husband would make nasty cracks, like, ‘Why don’t you go down to the Hurricane Center and get a job, do something with this weather stuff?’ ” says Meyer, who lives near Miami. “To tell you the truth, I found it very hard to understand how he could sit there and watch old episodes of ‘Ironsides’ again and again. The weather is always new. It’s like a soap opera, except things really happen. You come back in an hour and the storm’s either hit or it hasn’t.”

*

And now, Meyer’s husband is gone, blown off like a storm gone to sea. But the Weather Channel remains, flickering silently in Bobbi Meyer’s bedroom, an eternal procession of fronts and waves, heat and cold, danger and sunshine. “The truth is, the Weather Channel was one of those many little factors, when somebody makes fun of you for something you like, something that’s just harmless.”

Maybe you watch the Weather Channel like a normal person. You check in for two, three, maybe five minutes. You look at the local forecast. You monitor the progress of a storm approaching your parents’ town, then bail out when they start reciting the dew points. A normal viewer, surfing in and out of the channel. The Weather Channel is grateful for your visits.

But the viewers they value the most are those whom Weather Channel chief executive Mike Eckert calls “the weather-involved,” which is defined as people who devote three or more hours to each visit, people who return several times daily. Twenty percent of the channel’s viewers account for more than 40% of its ratings.

“We clearly love these people,” says Eckert, whose colleagues call their most loyal viewers “weather weenies.”

These are people who are serious about science, itinerant salesmen readying themselves for the next journey, gamblers looking for an edge by checking conditions at a faraway horse track or football stadium, or adults who once upon a time spent lazy hours staring out the window at thunderstorms.

They are folks like Meyer, who watches all day, or Howard Grisso, a retired meteorologist in Oregon who watches three, four, five hours at a stretch and knows when any of the 35 OCMs--On-Camera Meteorologists, in Weather Channel parlance--have had their hair cut. The body of intense viewers includes comedian Bill Cosby, who admits to watching for hours on end, and essayist Russell Baker, who once wrote, “Doctor, help me. I am hooked on the Weather Channel.”

The weather-involved can be found trading Weather Channel gossip on America Online’s weather message boards, exchanging tips on what their favorite weather babes are wearing, monitoring the progress of meteorologist Sharon Resultan’s pregnancy and subsequent weight loss, and bemoaning the inaccuracy of place-name pronunciations by the channel’s most widely despised on-air figure, Lisa Mozer.

*

True Weather Channel fanatics compile lists of their favorite meteorologists, offer strategies on contacting the on-air people, and even truth-squad the forecasts against their own measurements.

“The Weather Channel became really important to me on a trip my wife and I made to Washington from Houston to see the changing foliage,” says Alan Scott, an auditor who lives in Texas. “It was 24 hours after the big blizzard of ‘93, and I stayed up late watching the channel to plan our trip. Ever since then, I just watch it all the time.”

It’s programmed on Scott’s remote. He listens to the channel as he moves around the house each morning. He’s gotten to the point where he can recognize each of the meteorologists--without looking at the screen.

“My wife would even test me on their voices,” he says. “We make up nicknames for them. My wife sometimes teases me about Kristina Abernathy,” one of the most beloved of the channel’s stable of lithe, blond weather-casters. “But I doubt there’s a wife who doesn’t kid her husband about Kristina Abernathy.”

Once, when the Scotts were on business in Atlanta, they stopped by Weather Channel headquarters, hoping against hope for a glimpse, a brush, something. “I knew they had really tight security. I knew they didn’t let people inside. They’ve had problems with stalkers, and not just with the female meteorologists. There’s a love-hate relationship with some of the on-air people. Some people do get too serious about the Weather Channel. So we visited with the security guard for a few minutes, just to say we’d been there. And then we left.”

Scott trumpeted his coup on the Internet. Others among the weather-involved were suitably impressed.

The channel’s 2-million-hit-a-day Web site--https://www.weather.com--contains a warning urging fans not to attempt to contact on-air weather people. But few of the hard-core fans cause any problems with the Weather Channel staff. Mostly, they like to watch.