For Western North Carolina’s favorite weatherman, Ray Russell, being right is as much a relief as it is an affirmation. Fans of Ray’s Weather, a website celebrating 25 years in business this year, trust his predictions devoutly—a reliance that comes with the threat of condemnation should he misfire. Russell is acutely aware of this concern.
But as the howling winds and torrential rain of Hurricane Helene began to bear down on his Boone home in the pre-dawn hours of September 27, 2024, Russell’s knack for prognostication brought him little relief.
Russell, 67, had just published his latest forecast, titled “Historic and Catastrophic,” which warned that the massive tropical cyclone would unleash unprecedented damage across the region, which rarely experiences hurricanes at all, let alone of this magnitude.
Russell is not one for hyperbole. That’s part of why his readers trust him. In fact, he will righteously declare his hatred for the television news tendency to “hype” weather events as clickbait. But Helene was different. For the preceding week, Russell had sounded the alarm with increasing urgency.
“Bear down, bring it in, and cover it up,” he wrote that Tuesday. By Wednesday, he’d upgraded his warning: “This is not a drill.”
Knowing the power was destined to go out, Russell and his team were out of bed at 3 a.m. to run their final forecast models with the freshest data. There’s usually a jovial tone to these early morning forecasts, and Russell likes to speckle his write-ups with his sense of humor. Not that morning. He plied himself with coffee—he drinks about a pot a day—and hammered away at his keyboard.
“The next several hours of weather are going to live in our collective memories for a generation,” Russell wrote.
Looking back, he said in a recent interview, “It wound up being way too true.”
That morning, though, Russell worried he’d gone overboard.
Accuracy is a fine needle to thread; it’s just as easy to overdo it as it is to underestimate. But Eric Anderson, one of the three meteorologists who work for Russell, agreed the dire verbiage was warranted. Just after 5 a.m., Russell hit publish and turned away from his computer. A forecaster’s job ends when the storm begins, as Russell likes to say.
That’s when a heavy sense of dread set in.
Countless people were about to lose their homes, their livelihoods, and possibly their lives. And though Russell’s forecast may have given his community a last-minute heads-up, it could do nothing to stop it.
“It’s like you’re watching a train coming down the tracks and there’s a car stalled. Before it hits, you know it’s going to be a horrible thing,” Russell said. “I was already thinking about the human impact.”
A Knack for Storytelling
Russell’s fascination with forecasting began as a kid growing up in Manchester, Tennessee, in the 1960s during the height of the space race. But when he gazed toward the sky, he wasn’t looking for rockets.
Snow days promised a break from routine, an escape from the classroom to make snowmen and hurl snowballs at his buddies. Russell became obsessed with trying to predict them. He’d watched the sky for changes in the clouds and read all the books a 10-year-old could, eventually becoming more enthralled in the prediction process than the snow day activities. He dreamed of becoming a weatherman when he grew up.
“I think I’m wired to want to know what’s coming,” Russell said. “Life can’t be predictable, but taking away some element of unpredictability, there’s power in that when you can do it.”
When Russell latches onto something, he doesn’t let go. As a pre-teen, he once lost a game of ping pong. He practiced every second he could for weeks after. Next go-around, he obliterated the competition.
As he got older, Russell sidelined his love of weather in favor of other interests. In college at Freed-Hardeman University, Russell embarked on “the strangest double major you’ve ever heard,” religion and computer science. After graduating in 1979, he took a position as a minister at the Church of Christ in Ashland, Mississippi.
Unlike suburban Tennessee, rural Mississippi was teeming with a level of racism that Russell, who is white, says he never knew existed. It disgusted him. He left his church post to pursue master’s degrees in computer science and mathematics and then entered a doctoral program at Georgia Institute of Technology. In Atlanta, Russell fell back into ministry “by accident,” after getting a call from a local church between preachers and looking for a part-timer to fill in for a few months.
“Three months became two and a half years,” said Russell, but he did it while finishing his doctorate, which he earned in 1989.
After a stint as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a fellowship with NASA, Russell accepted a job in Appalachian State University’s computer science department in 1991, where he’d remain until his retirement in 2021. (He’s returned to the pulpit a few times in Boone, but no longer holds an official role in a church. “I just don’t feel like that’s the right thing for me,” Russell said.)
In the classroom, Russell didn’t just regurgitate lesson plans, said Dr. Jay Fenwick, a longtime colleague who now chairs the department. He had a passion and approach that fostered a special relationship with students.
“Ray’s teaching style was very much like most of the other things that Ray does. He puts everything into a story,” Fenwick said. “He wasn’t just a write-a-fact-on-the-board kind of a person.”
He also steered that passion toward another of his fixations: running. Russell would invite his students to join him on runs, goading them to see if they could outrun an older man. Many would try, Fenwick recalled. Most were left in the dust.
In the mid-’90s, Russell turned his passions back to weather, but this time with the sharpened methodology of an academic. He taught himself the science behind forecasting and used publicly available weather data to write up a humble snow forecast from his Appalachian State University webpage.
In 1998, his wife, Rhonda, gave him his first weather station, which at the time cost about $700. Now collecting his own, more accurate data from his backyard, Russell’s hobby quickly accelerated into a side hustle, and people in the community were starting to notice.
One of Russell’s first taglines was “forecasting without a net.”
“He was going out on a limb,” Fenwick said. “But he was pretty good at it because he had taken the time and focused that passion to learn the science behind it.”
In February 2000, a local radio station called him for a morning forecast, which spun into a daily live segment. Then the local newspaper, the Watauga Democrat, ran a story on Russell’s forecasting gig that got picked up by the Associated Press and printed in hundreds of newspapers across the southeast.
“My website, that was maybe getting 150 hits a day, was suddenly getting thousands of hits a day,” Russell said. “It was no longer just a little professor’s hobby.”
He moved the website off of the university’s servers and Ray’s Weather, the business, was born. A local start-up offered to help Russell build the website, and with the help of the radio station’s sales team, started monetizing ad space on the website, earning just enough money to pay the bills. That fall, Anderson joined the forecasting team, and soon Russell hired his then-college-aged daughter to do the bookkeeping.
The business, “Just kind of grew organically out of doing this with no plan,” Russell said. He’d also become the chair of the computer science department at App.
“I didn’t have time to manage it,” he said. “I was a full-time faculty member, so all of this was spinning around me and all I’m really doing is getting up at 5 a.m. to do a forecast.”
Russell hired David Still, a morning TV weatherman working out of Memphis, in 2013. Still ran the business side of the site for eight years and said during that period Ray’s Weather became “the water cooler” topic of conversation for Avery, Ashe, and Watauga counties.
“It was just what you talked about,” said Still.“‘What did Ray say?’ That was common to hear out loud.”
The website was completely free until October 2023, when Russell added a $26-a-year premium subscription option, which adds features including a customizable dashboard with saved locations and webcams. However, he says that “75 percent” of the information on the website is still available free of charge.
“I think I’m wired to want to know what’s coming. Life can’t be predictable, but taking away some element of unpredictability, there’s power in that when you can do it.” -Ray Russell, founder of Ray’s Weather
One subscriber, Boone psychologist Marjory Holder, said she’s happy to pay for the service.
“I want to make sure they stay in business,” Holder said. “We need it. It’s much more accurate than any of the other weather stations. Everybody misses some things but Ray is usually much more spot-on than anybody else.”
Still only partially attributes the website’s popularity to Russell’s prowess as a forecaster—even if that is exceptional. The other key element is Russell’s ability to spin the data into a compelling narrative, which is harder than crunching data for many meteorologists.
“Ray can tell an amazing story in six sentences,” Still said. “Not many people can do that period, but do it with weather—he’s one of a handful of people in the world.”
Russell directed his local clout back to the community. He served in public office twice—as a Democrat in the state House representing the 93rd district from 2019 to 2021. After losing his reelection bid, he served a term on the Watauga County Board of Commissioners until last year, when redistricting resulted in his district’s race being moved to 2026.
Russell used his platform in public office to advocate for protecting natural resources and channeling public funding to conservation and environmental stewardship, said Charlie Brady, executive director of the Blue Ridge Conservancy.
“He is really committed to the people here and I think that’s part of the reason he’s led a life of service,” Brady said. “I think he sees it as a responsibility.”
The Perfect Storm
Hurricanes in autumn already tend to be large and strong, but warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the Caribbean fueled Helene’s fury. As the storm’s trajectory began to zero in on Western North Carolina, another weather system heading northeast was on-path to intersect it—a phenomenon known as a Fujiwhara effect—effectively sling-shotting Helene directly at the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was gearing up to be the perfect storm.
The last storm of this magnitude was more than 100 years ago, “The Great Flood” of 1916 which caused record-breaking flooding, damage, and numerous deaths. While the region had dealt with a handful of other major storms since—most notably in 1940 and 2004—Helene “beat them all,” Russell said, inflicting damage over a 250-mile-wide disaster area.
“That’s absolutely unprecedented,” Russell said. “Is it a 100-year event or a 1,000-year event? I don’t know, and what makes it impossible to answer that question is we know bigger storms are going to happen because of climate change. We know that is going to happen and it is happening, but hopefully this perfect setup for a massive storm I don’t see again in my lifetime.”
Another factor would add to Helene’s sucker punch in the High Country. It had already rained every day in the week leading up to the hurricane, and the ground was saturated with more than 5 inches of rainfall. Boone’s creeks and rivers were already bloated. Then, Helene dumped another 20 inches in many places.
“Ray can tell an amazing story in six sentences. Not many people can do that period, but do it with weather—he’s one of a handful of people in the world.” - David Still, meteorologist
The soaked groundwater triggered hundreds of landslides in the area, adding randomness to Helene’s destructive path based on topography and proximity to waterways.
While a flat landscape can expect a relatively even level of destruction, the dramatic peaks and valleys of the mountains meant one property could be left relatively unscathed, while a neighboring home was swept away as gravity transformed tiny mountain streams into unstoppable tsunamis of mud, trees, and debris that took out everything in its path downhill.
The unique topography and climate of the region are also what make forecasting here a challenge for many larger, regional meteorological services.
“We’re sort of a microclimate,” said Leila Jackson, communications director for the Blue Ridge Conservancy. “We weren’t really represented in a way that was useful.”
That’s because most mainstream forecasts rely on computer modelings of sparse National Weather Service data boiled down to a mathematical aggregate for any given region, Russell said. In the pancake flats of Oklahoma, that mode tends to be pretty accurate, according to Russell, but in the greater Boone area, because of the elevation and topographical differences it can be snowing to the west and sunny a few miles away on the other side of the ridge.
What Ray’s Weather did differently was provide a hyperlocal focus on regions in the mountains, with different forecasts for the various enclaves.
“It’s very difficult to capture all the little nuances. The people using their Apple phones to check the temperature don’t have any earthly idea that there’s no weather station behind that—that’s just a computer model approximation of what the temperature is, and it can be wrong like crazy,” said Russell. “My data is coming from a weather station. Your phone is making it up.”
At any given moment, Ray’s Weather has up to 70 weather stations online feeding him site-specific data from various coordinates throughout Western North Carolina spread over a radius that extends from the Virginia border to Hendersonville. Live webcams on his website provide a bird’s eye view of conditions from West Jefferson to the top of Appalachian Ski Mountain. If there’s rain in Boone but sunshine in Blowing Rock, Ray’s Weather aims to tell the difference.
“Weather is such a complex system in every way, and the marvel should not be that sometimes forecasters get it wrong,” Russell said. “The marvel should be that, how did they ever get any of it right?”
On the morning of September 27, Helene ramped up with the rising sun, tearing trees from their roots and causing the stormwater to wash out roads. Keenly aware of the insurmountable natural forces at work, Russell chose to do something he could control—he hopped on his Peloton bike.
A former marathon runner, Russell gained weight after his last race and wasn’t happy about it. But he always thinks like a scientist and there’s no problem an equation can’t solve. And so since March, Russell had plugged away on his stationary bike and the local trail system, and dropped 50 pounds in the process.
“Weather is such a complex system in every way, and the marvel should not be that sometimes forecasters get it wrong. The marvel should be that, how did they ever get any of it right?” - Ray Russell, founder of Ray’s Weather“
Maybe a lot of meteorologists are control freaks, but then again we know as meteorologists if anything wild and crazy is going to happen,” said Still, who relocated his family from Boone on that Thursday before Helene hit. “I knew that we couldn’t hold the water, so we went to Wilkesboro where we knew we were going to be safe.”
As Helene’s bands of rain and wind beat down on the landscape harder and harder outside his Boone home that Friday morning, Russell pedaled away on his Peloton before the inevitable electrical outage. At 8 a.m., the lights went out.
The Weather Center
The headquarters of Ray’s Weather is an office space on the fourth floor of Boone’s LifeStore Bank building, with a large window overlooking the main drag of chain restaurants and stores that line Route 321 toward the rounded hump of Howard’s Knob.
It’s mid-December, and the office is cluttered with boxes containing weather stations yet to be installed, merchandise like branded coffee mugs and T-shirts, and copies of the 2025 calendar Ray’s Weather puts out as a fundraising collaboration with the Blue Ridge Conservancy.
Russell’s desk is set up like a battle station, with a Georgia Tech travel coffee mug, a few scribbled notes, and two large monitors. That afternoon, he’d been working on some programming for the website and a database filled the screen.
This has been a busy season at the station, and Russell has spent a good chunk of it on the road logging hundreds of miles installing, fixing, and configuring his nearly six dozen weather stations that span North Carolina’s Blue Ridge.
His team is smaller these days, down to three from a peak of eight meteorologists several years ago. Neither ad revenue nor local talent are quite what they used to be.
Russell also has a 20-year-old office manager, Maya Nelson, whom he praises endlessly for keeping the business organized.
But having fewer hands on deck has not been without its challenges. Russell says he’s working as hard as ever, except perhaps the two years when he juggled being a full-time professor, business owner, and state representative.
Although he’s officially retired, Russell isn’t slowing down.
In December, Russell ran the Kiawah Island half marathon in South Carolina, clocking in just shy of two hours—a respectable time for runners half his age and an incredible one for someone nearing 70. Because that’s the thing about Russell: He’s doggedly stubborn when he sets his sights on a goal.
This drive, as Russell noted with a chuckle, could be chalked up to the “small difference between optimism and stupidity.”
It’s an optimism built into so many of Russell’s endeavors, from trying to predict an uncontrollable future to running for public office as a Democrat in a red state.
By late afternoon, clouds roll in and obscure the top of Howard’s Knob that hangs in the distance outside Russell’s window. Raindrops begin to dot the glass.
Had he accurately predicted this shower?
“Let’s see what time it is,” he said, grinning and checking his Garmin watch. “Yeah, it absolutely has permission to rain.”