21st Anniversary

I was reminded that this week marks the 21st anniversary of this blog... it started in mid-October 1996 during Hurricane Lili as a simple email to a handful of interested friends and family.  I was a junior in college with no formal education in tropical meteorology (I was majoring in physics and astronomy).

The emails offered a "one-stop shopping" experience for people who didn't want to go hunting for the current activity and forecasts themselves (there were no smartphones, and the internet and web browsers weren't what they are now).  There were no images or graphics in the updates back then.  The email distribution list that I started in 1996 is still in use today, and even has some of the original subscribers! At the time, I had no intention of continuing it into 1997, let alone 2017.

This is now the 22nd consecutive year that I've been doing this, and it's been fun!  The nearly 1200 updates have spanned 344 Atlantic tropical cyclones, in case anyone was counting.

Incidentally, I saved all of the hurricane-related newspaper articles in the Reading Eagle from 1996, and here is one from October 18, 1996:

I also printed basin-wide satellite images most days that season (and still have all of them)... The Weather Channel had them available on their website.  Here is one from October 17th showing Hurricane Lili south of Cuba:

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