About us

Every hobby project has an origin story. Ours is just a bit older than most.

The founder

Herbert Johannes Sebaldus Fürchtegott Immerklar Ehrlich was born in 1702 in Elend ("Misery"), a small village in the Harz mountains that really is called that. He grew up in the neighboring village of Sorge ("Sorrow"), which is also true and probably explains his later career choice. Anyone who grows up between Misery and Sorrow develops a healthy need to at least know where they stand with the weather.

As a child, Herbert is said to have spent hours sitting on the church tower categorizing clouds in a hand-bound notebook titled "What Comes From Above, Honestly Written Down." His life's ambition, as the family chronicle records verbatim, was to build "the best free weather site in Germany." That no websites existed yet for this purpose didn't bother him. An Ehrlich isn't stopped by technical details – he simply waits 300 years.

The misfortune

Herbert's parents were hay farmers. In the summer of 1719, his father wanted to check the weather report in the Elend-Sorge Weekly Gazette before mowing, as usual. Back then it sat on page 17, wedged between a full-page ad for gout miracle tincture and four columns of advertising for wig powder. By the time he found it, the thunderstorm was already over the field. The hay was lost, the father soaked to the bone, and his lungs never forgave him for it.

On his deathbed, he is said to have made Herbert promise something that binds the family to this day: "Boy, the weather has to be on the front page. And no advertising around it." His mother dryly added that he should also please note how often the weather prophet gets it wrong, since the one from the Gazette was apparently only ever right when it was sunny.

The legacy

Herbert kept his word. From 1723 he ran a black slate board on the market square of Wernigerode, chalking the state of the sky on it every five minutes; errand boys brought the readings down from the church tower. Contemporaries called it "Ehrlich's Folly." We call it today the first rain radar with 5-minute resolution. He refused advertising on the board, even though the wig-powder merchant offered good money. And when he was wrong, he wrote it in big letters at the top the next morning: "Wrong yesterday. Honestly."

The town council, incidentally, already wanted back then to note who stopped at the board and for how long. Herbert answered the proposal with a sponge. We've inherited that attitude too.

Today

Roughly three hundred years later, we're carrying on Herbert's board, just with a bit more computing power and a bit less chalk: weather on the front page, no advertising, no tracking, and a public list of our mistakes under "How good are we?". Where the data comes from and how we calculate it is laid out, with no wig powder in between, in the Methodology.

Honesty note, because the name demands it: a certain portion of this story is a tall tale. Elend and Sorge really exist, so does the wig powder, and everything about our data and our errors is true. As for the rest, we'll say it plainly: we weren't there in 1702.