Ray's Weather

About Us

A retired computer science professor at Appalachian State University, Russell holds a doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been ordained as a Church of Christ minister, served as a member of the N.C. House of Representatives and is a certified running coach.

Why are your forecasts different from those of national weather outlets?
A national weather site has sparse data that is made up, not real data. They are interpolating — it’s a guess from actual data. That might work in Oklahoma, where it’s flat, but you can’t do that in a mountain environment and get away with the fact that people don’t know any better.

If you go to big commercial sites, they are totally produced by computers without any human intervention. Good forecasts start with good meteorologists, and we have five.

Anybody in the business of forecasting anything is going to be wrong sometimes. What we try to do with our forecast is to say, “It’s going to rain.” We don’t say what percent. We use terms like widely scattered and isolated, and then we give the time frame: afternoon and overnight, etc. We try to put out a specific forecast that is actionable, that people can actually plan their days around.

The Blue Ridge on the eastern escarpment of the Appalachian chain is a major weather boundary. There is much more rain along the Blue Ridge: When you lift that air over the ridge, it produces more rain in that region. In the winter, you get more snow on the western side of the Appalachians. The spine of the Appalachians is right along the Tennessee and North Carolina border — that is a major