Note to Readers

Dear Readers,

I wish to provide you with some advance notice about a major change coming to this blog.

For the past 14 years, we've provided the highest quality of weather, climate and civics information free and with very few advertisements for my books and photography. 

Unfortunately, inflation is striking Mike Smith Enterprises, LLC rather hard. Most people believe weather information is free and some is. 

But the professional-grade weather information such as RadarScope (example above from Thursday afternoon) is expensive as are a number of my other sources of raw information. Those are the ingredients I use to make my forecasts. 

In addition, during the past year, there have been numerous times when I have stayed up past midnight -- in one case beyond 3am -- to provide the latest and best tornado, hurricane and other extreme weather information. The night of the Bowling Green KY tornado (December 2021), I stayed up until 4:30 am and issued tornado warnings before they were available from other sources. 

Over the years, I have received a number of compliments from readers along the lines of 

We had no idea a tornado was possible. If I hadn't read your blog (or Twitter), I might have died.

In addition, I've run a number of important investigative reports related to extreme weather warnings, wind energy and other important topics -- in some cases years before the topics reached mainstream consciousness. 

I've come to believe that these efforts are worthy of at least some renumeration. 

So, we've come to the point where I am going to have to receive a stream of income for all of these efforts in order to continue this blog. People obviously like reading it as some months we have more than 600,000 page views. 

I've looked at paid (subscription) blog and other ways of directly charging readers for our information. While that is possible in the future for specialized information, I've decided the best way to do this is to allow advertising on the blog. I know what you are thinking: "I hate blog ads." Me, too. 

The company that I'm talking with says I will have approval over the ads that appear on the blog. So, I hope to keep sleazy companies off. I also hope they will be reasonably unobtrusive. 

I am going to open comments with this posting and I look forward to reading them. 

Thank you for your continued support,

Mike