There were a bunch of weather phone numbers all over the country. Many of them ended with “1010” or “1212”, and were operated by corporations, banks, corporations, and even the National Weather Service.
“Weather streaks have actually been around for generations,” explains Lauren Bruce of ClearlyIP. I have been with Weather Line Services for 15 years.
“They started in the 'Ma Bell' days so people could call at any time if they needed to know not only the time, but also what the weather was going to be like each day.”
People used it a lot, especially in the 1990s, Bruce says. Once the Internet and cell phones appeared, demand began to decline. However, Bruce says they still received 10 million calls last year nationwide, and the service is especially popular here in Ohio, where ClearlyIP runs lines in 8 cities.
Just looking at a snapshot of a single day in January of last year, there were about 2,000 calls on the line in Dayton, almost that many in Cincinnati and Columbus, and twice that amount — 4,000 — in Cleveland.
Bruce says they surveyed callers a few years ago, and while many of them were older, there were a large number of callers between 30 and 45 years old. Some are calling out of nostalgia, she says. The National Weather Service in Wilmington says it's getting a lot of calls from the Amish community.
Bruce says a woman in Cleveland told them she called because she couldn't read the clock from her chair in a nursing home and was hungry.
“She said that if she didn't tell the nurses she wanted a snack at snack time, she wouldn't get a snack. So, she would kind of obsessively call just to get the time so she knew when to ask for a snack. A snack,” Bruce laughs.
ClearlyIP weather forecasts are so popular in Ohio, the company employs a real person — not an AI-generated voice — to record forecasts.
The man behind the sound
His name is Keith Allen. He is 82 years old and lives in a suburb of Washington, DC. It prepares forecasts for eight cities in Ohio and more than a dozen others in other states.
Allen obtains raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency that oversees the National Weather Service, and then interprets it for each city. This meant that he had to learn all the characteristics and peculiarities of the weather in cities across Ohio.
He sometimes even uses online traffic cameras to see what things are like in a particular city.
“Before you had traffic cameras, if I was unsure about the weather in a particular city, what I would do is I would call a random number in those cities. And [when someone answered]I would say to them: Well, I'm sorry, I got the wrong number. By the way, what's the weather like there in Cincinnati? “
Allen doesn't put much effort into weather forecasting — he's quick to point out that he's not a meteorologist — but he is committed to providing service, even updating forecasts several times a day in up to 20 cities nationwide.
“The product I launched, I'm very proud of it, and I want it to be accurate because people are planning their lives, and they're hearing my voice. They're planning their days around what they're wearing. If it's inclement, if there's a weather risk — ice and snow — people are going to be more careful.”
He's been logging the weather for decades and has no plans to stop anytime soon. For him, it's a calling.
