Westefeld thinks not, and he's offering the program again this summer in the hope that more people will come forward. As with any kind of phobia or psychological problem, people tend to keep quiet about it. We may not be talking about massive numbers, but there is a percentage of the population that experiences this fear at a very high level. If weather phobics are at one extreme, at the other end of the continuum are people who are obsessed in a different way. Lightning lovers stand out in fields or other potentially dangerous places during storms, hoping to capture a dramatic photo before they're zapped into a hospital bed.
Storm chasers race around the countryside snapping at the heels of tornado-spawning storm fronts.
Whatever the level of interest, as the proliferation of related Internet sites and television programming suggests, there is an insatiable demand for information about weather. With its live, eyewitness reports by on-camera meteorologists, the Weather Channel puts you right in the middle of the flailing palm trees, toppling streetlights, and fleeing masses. When it comes to seeing what the weather's like, people evidently prefer to switch on the TV rather than look out the window. In fact, weather now seems to rank as highly as the news it once merely followed on television. Whether it's tornadoes and hurricanes or droughts and global warming, weather is often the lead story on prime-time TV news.