Weather Underground was founded in 1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online weather database. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp.

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal: “Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data.

The announcement on Monday that the Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the nation.

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