About Our Forecasters

RaysWeather.Com continues to grow. We are an "information age" company using the web to broadcast the message but also as a tool for producing the message. RaysWeather.Com (what we call RWC) has evolved from "Ray's hobby in Beautiful Downtown Rutherwood" in 1999 to the most widely read media outlet in NW NC averaging nearly 4 million web paged delivered each month and read by about 200,000 people per month. We cover the weather from NC/VA line to Waynesville, NC, the Mountains to the Foothills, and all the micro-climates in between. We will continue to grow geographically as well--Morganton is our most recent addition. The heart of the growth is good data, "local flavor", and THE most reliable forecast.

RWC has assembled the best forecast team ever for this region. Here's "the forecast crew"...

• Dr. Ray Russell is a Computer Science professor at Appalachian State University. His PhD is in Computer Science from Georgia Tech (1989); weather has been a long-time passion. He started posting a "snow forecast" on the university website back in the mid 1990's; this evolved into RaysWeather.Com in 2000. Ray lives in Boone and has taught at Appalachian State since 1991. Ray's wife Rhonda is a kindergarten teacher at Parkway School in Watauga County. Ray and Rhonda have two daughters (Leah, a psychologist in Raleigh, and Laura, in the last year of Pharmacy School at Auburn), a son-in-law (Danny, who works for Wachovia Bank in Raleigh), and two dogs (Lily and Sam).
• Eric Anderson (RWC's Chief Meteorologist) received his degree in meteorology from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and is a 16-year veteran of NOAA with experience in forecasting, observation and analysis. A native of western North Carolina, Eric's former tenure in the National Weather Service gave him the opportunity to forecast for areas of the Mid-Atlantic region. His professional interests include upslope flow snow events in the southern Appalachians, as well as cold air damming in the Carolinas.
• Alan Simons, born in Fayetteville NC, has a Bachelor of Science in meteorology and 20 years of professional experience that includes forecasting for newspapers, websites, radio, aviation, and the military. He first became interested in weather in North Carolina, and RWC takes him back home after a variety of duty stations, from New York to Hawaii. Alan's been with the RWC team since 2003.
• Harold Alston is a N.C. native with Bachelor of Science degrees from both App State (Broadcast Communications) and UNC-Asheville (Meteorology). He has over 30 years experience tracking and forecasting NC weather including 16 years experience for media outlets. Nailing down Appalachian wedges & wintry possibilities are his areas of expertise with a lifetime of N.C. weather experiences to reference.
• Chris Jumper, is the latest addition to the RWC team. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. At UNCA, he was a forecaster for the school's Weather Forecast Line and served as vice-president of the UNCA Student Chapter of the American Meteorological Society. Chris has experience as a meteorologist by working at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. Since his youth, Chris has always had a passion for the weather. Chris says, "My grandmother was terrified of severe weather so I wanted to make reliable forecasts to comfort her and keep her safe."