Bob Baron was a TV meterologist on Nov. 15, 1989, when an F-4 tornado flipped vehicles and flattened buildings on one of the busiest roads in Huntsville at rush hour.
The historic storm left 21 people dead, 463 injured, 259 homes destroyed and weather forecasting flaws tragically exposed.
“We were pretty much state-of-the-art as far as equipment was concerned, but that tornado came without any warning,” recalls Baron.
“That day the only thing that was live and current and gave me any kind of data was the lightning detection,” he says. “It did not tell me that we had a tornado, but it at least told me where the storm was.”
Tornado debris fell in his yard that awful afternoon.
“We definitely knew some folks that were killed and we knew some folks that survived,” he remembers.
Talking later to latchkey kids who were home alone when the storm hit, “the gravity of it really struck me.”
The limitations of late-’80s forecasting tools weighed so heavily on him that Baron vowed to start a company that could do better.
Today Baron Weather provides weather software and data to television stations across Alabama, including WDHN in Dothan, WKRG in Mobile, WSFA in Montgomery, WHNT and WAFF in Huntsville, and WBMA, WBRC and WIAT in Birmingham.
Their technicians travel the globe and have installed radar equipment on five contintents.
James Spann, chief meterologist for Birmingham’s ABC 33/40 and one of the best-known weather forecasters in the state, has known Baron personally for years.
“He totally changed the game when it comes to broadcast meteorology,” Spann says. “The radar and graphics software developed by Baron makes it so easy for us to communicate high weather impact events to the public — espcially tornadoes.
“I use their equipment exclusively, and I’m so thankful for what they do in Huntsville,” says Spann.
Specific products include traffic and weather data combined, mobile apps, advanced alerting, weather modeling, high-resolution forecasts, 3-D views inside storms and onscreen graphics. Their Lynx platforms doubles as an analytical and communication tool used to convey critical weather information to the public.
Company technicians installed a weather radar system atop a 196-foot water tower in Durant, Oklahoma. The Panama Canal Authority selected them to install a radar system and data display technology to improve the safety of shipping operations in the canal. Cape Canaveral uses their products to assess launch viability.
“We provide software that helps non-meterologists interpret the weather and determine the significant aspects of the weather,” explains Baron Weather CEO Bob Dreisewerd.
When the company began, the urgent need was for live data, so that was the starting point as Baron collaborated with Chief Technology Officer Tom Thompson. By 1992, the company had developed storm tracking capability that integrated lightning, radar and tracking in real time.
“We had built a mapping system that allowed us to zoom in, and this was kind of a first,” Baron recalls. It would indicate storm direction and speed and, most importantly, identify communites at risk.
He says it needed to be highly specific “so that those in harm’s way would know they were in harm’s way and take cover.”
The critical warning time frame needed to be about 10 minutes out “or we started having damages, injuries and even deaths.”
Three-dimensional “fly-throughs” of storms were the rage among forecasters those days, but they took too long to load. The need was for vectorized mapping and lighning data you could zoom into.
“Unfortunately we didn’t think to patent it,” Baron recalls. “We were about two years into this thing until we got our first patent.”
About a third of the company’s business now is providing display software and weather and traffic data for TV stations primarily across the U.S. and in Canada. Another third is providing weather data, software, alerting and weather decision solutions for businesses and consumers.
Customers could include a large telecom company, a public safety agency, a utility company or an airline.
“All these businesses that have a need for weather information typically get some type of weather information from a private company like ourselves,” Dreisewerd says. The data is tailored to their needs.
Baron’s biggest partnership is with Sirius XM.
“We actually deliver weather data over the Sirius XM satellite that gets into aircraft when they’re flying and into boats outside of the U.S. when you don’t have cell coverage,” he says.
“We first started this 20 years ago. We were putting weather data through Sirius XM right into the aircraft so they could get a radar image or weather data right in the cockpit.
“A big part of our buiness still is giving weather data directly to pilots, mainly general aviation,” adds Dreisewerd, “in real time while they’re flying.”
The final piece of Baron’s business is building weather radars “that we then sell to commercial customers or government customers around the globe,” Dreisewerd says.
“A government may buy one or they may buy five or six. In Morocco we’re installing eight. In Zimbabwe three years ago they bought five.
“Our biggest contract to date was with the U.S. National Weather Service. Between 2008 and 2013 we upgraded the entire U.S. Weather Service to what’s called dual polarization radars.”
TV stations have access to government radar, but like to “buy their own because they can control it” by adjusting speed and direction, Dreisewerd says.
“They can put it near to the center of population, which gives better coverage, and they can run it faster than the weather service runs their radar so they get more frequent updates.”
If the radar dome is too far away or high, the data it’s providing is not as useful.
“There can be a distinct difference between seeing rotation in a storm at 5,000 or 6,000 feet (elevation) and seeing rotation in a storm at 1,000 feet,” says Dreisewerd.
Decades ago, tornado warning time may have been as little as five minutes — today it’s as much as 15.
“It’s gotten so much better as far as the precision that we can get and the lead time that we’re able to provide” for significant weather events, he says.
“Baron was the first to develop these stormtracks with time of arrivals,” where little boxes show exactly when a storm should hit a community. “You see those all the time now.”
Critical weather, as they classify it, can include hail, high winds, snow, ice storms and flash flooding.
“Fire weather is a growing area — being able to predict the spread of forest fires based on weather data,” Dreisewerd says.
Roughly 100 people work at Baron, most at its Huntsville location. The operations center is staffed 24 hours a day. About a third of the staff has a weather background such as an academic degree or military experience. A small branch office in North Carolina does weather modeling. Dreisewerd, a meteorologist, has been with Baron for 18 years after moving to Huntsville from St. Louis.
Baron retired from the company three years ago but is still chairman of the board.
For him, better forecasting is personal.
“I did this for us,” Baron says. “I did this for the community. As it turned out, we started saying other people could use this.”
Their timing was good. The company was ramping up “just as the National Weather Service was starting to implement their Nexrad program — the implementation of Doppler radars across the country,” he says.
“They had an old network of convetional radars they wanted taken down and hauled away,” he says.
Baron bid on them, refurbished them and sold the radars and storm tracking product to client stations.
Some climatologists theorize that the so-called Tornado Alley has shifted east, putting southern states at higher risk.
Maybe, maybe not.
“We have seen a shift in the last 30 years for there to be an increase in activity in Southeast U.S. and a slight decrease in the Plains, but they’re still both focal points,” Dreisewerd says.
He won’t be drawn into the climate change debate, saying simply that the climate “has been changing for the history of the Earth.”
It helps that “we have far better reporting today than we had 20 years ago.”
Emerging technologies should make forecasting even more precise in the future.
“We’re starting to see machine learning and artificial intelligence apply to weather technology to improve the speed at which we can generate new forecasts and warnings,” Dreisewerd says.
As it evolves, Baron Weather will stick to its initial vision of better detection and dissemination to save lives.
Generating immediate response “is what’s guided the company” all these years, says Baron. “That part hasn’t changed.”
Deborah Storey and Dennis Keim are Huntsville-based freelance contributors to Business Alabama.
This article appears in the March 2025 issue of Business Alabama.
