Pursuing Online Weather-Forecast Impact in a Fast-Changing Media Climate

Here’s the post-show post and audio podcast for my conversation with the Capital Weather team, who’ve just returned to independence after 18 years of weather communication and community building affiliated with the Washington Post.

Details are in the curtain-raiser post:

We talked about their early days as a blog back in 2004, when co-founder Jason Samenow was at the Environmental Protection Agency working on the possible carbon dioxide endangerment finding while experimenting in his spare time with weather blogging. Boy, it’s wild to look back:

We talked about the potential impact of Trump-driven federal budget and staffing cuts on the basic data that private forecasters rely on — a question their colleague Matthew Cappucci has been closely tracking:

Matthew Cappucci@MatthewCappucci

The lack of morning weather balloons launched across the western and central U.S. is having a real, tangible impact on degrading forecast quality. We can't look at weather balloon data that doesn't exist. We can't pump nonexistent data into models. We can't rely as heavily on

5:31 PM · Jun 3, 2026 · 231K Views

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135 Replies · 1.49K Reposts · 4.44K Likes

We explored how the implosion of local TV budgets is spawning a nationwide array of independent meteorologists building their own audiences and businesses. Samenow mentioned that the American Meteorological Society has launched a Certified Digital Meteorologist (CDM) training and certification program to offer communities some assurance of the skills of the forecasters they depend on.

There’s lots more, so please watch and please share this post! If you don’t, someone who could benefit from these insights won’t see them.

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Parting weather shot: Net hats are an essential spring fashion accessory on muggy hot days here in Downeast Maine.