BOONE, N.C. — “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.”
Ray Russell, a computer science professor at Appalachian State University, didn’t set out to prove Mark Twain’s wisecrack wrong. He just wanted to get a better forecast for snowstorms across the High Country of Western North Carolina.
What started as a hobby with the weather station kit his wife bought him for Christmas almost 20 years ago has boomed into a thriving online business.
Clicking on RaysWeather.com, an average of 300,000 unique monthly visitors troop to about a dozen domain names that cover Surry County at the Virginia state line down the Blue Ridge to Asheville and Waynesville.
In the mid-’90s, when the Internet was in its infancy and accessed with clunky dial-up connections, weather data came out of Raleigh, covering everything from Wilmington to Murphy. Russell was frustrated that weather reports couldn’t predict when it would snow in Boone.
When he set up his backyard station, Russell had Boone’s first live feed of weather data, which he began to post daily on the Appalachian State University website.
What was a part-time hobby became a professional business. With a home office, his daughter handling bookkeeping and his wife selling advertising,
Article source: http://www.wral.com/nc-professor-turns-hobby-into-weather-website/13254348/ If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com
