WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) -- Millions of brides and grooms all over the world agonize for months about one question: Will it rain on my wedding day?
Have often have you wondered about thunderstorms on that beach vacation? Or snow at the ski resort?
How happy would you be if you could look out almost a year anywhere in the world and know what the weather was going to be?
Maybe you can.
Bill Kirk and his WeatherTrends360 may save you. Type any city or zip code into his WeatherTrends360 website, and he'll give you a forecast out nearly a year. Sun or rain... hot or cold.
"Say I wanted a warm, dry vacation, this might be the period to do it," looking at a summer week in Virginia Beach. "Versus a stormy period might be in here, or over here."
Kirk's hauled in climate scientists and mathematicians and weather historians to develop an algorithm audited at about 80 percent accuracy. "What we've done is a more statistical, math, climate cycle based approach."
"So it's possible like LA Story with Steve Martin, I could just record the weather and say 'See y'all nest week!'" WUSA9 chief meteorologist Topper Shutt joked with Kirk. "No, no, no. You're too good. We can't do that."
"So you said April of this year was going to be dry, and you were right, it was dry?" I told him, looking at his records. "Correct."
Doubt it?
Well scores of companies have been paying WeatherTrends big bucks for years. "Black and Decker is a client," says Kirk. "So warm dry weather, they sell a boatload of these in the spring." he says pointing at weedwhackers as we wander through a hardware store. "Cold and rainy. They don't sell any."
"In a terrible winter storm, they're actually going to sell more birdseed? Millions and millions more bags."
The companies are willing to pay Kirk's WeatherTrends360 hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and he says it can help you out too.
"How often do you come here in January and it's freezing and you want a coat and they don't have any. Or a snowblower and they're stocked out."
For every one degree the temperature goes up, beer sales increase one and a half percent. People buy Coke when it gets hot ... but when it gets too hot, they switch to water.
Kirk admits he cannot predict a 100 year storm -- like Hurricane Katrina. But a year beforehand, WeatherTrends did predict a big hurricane would hit somewhere in the Gulf. "WalMart pre-positioned inventory in that area months in advance, and it actually hit...Everybody remembers WalMart was there, with their merchandise, before the government was."
Not that he's always right. "You said it would be cool here, and it was hot, that doesn't make you happy?" I asked him, pointing at his records.
Weathertrends offers a daily forecast... but Kirk says it's much better to look at the trend for the week.
So I asked him about my upcoming vacation "I was going to go on vacation in Virginia Beach right in here." "Not good." "And we moved it back to here." "Good move." "So this is your test. If it's raining on my vacation, I'm going to be mad!" "You know where I live."
Turns out I'm NOT going to have to hunt down Bill Kirk from WeatherTrends. The vacation was perfect -- just as predicted.
Written and Reported by Bruce Leshan
9News Now & wusa9.com