If you watch tv weather it most likely has a Huntsville connection. Many
tv stations use their products, like VIPIR, Stormwarn, FutureScan...
By GINA HANNAH
Times Business Writer
gina.hannah@htimes.com
New site includes 'tornado-hardened'building for safety
For 17 years, Baron Services has been helping people protect themselves from bad weather. The Huntsville-based company's new building, which is scheduled to break ground today in Cummings Research Park, will have an area designed to protect the company's staff and equipment.
The "tornado-hardened" server facility, essentially a building within a building, will help ensure that TV stations, local governments and other organizations get weather information without interruption, no matter the weather, said Kim Grantham, spokeswoman for Baron Services.
"The safety of our people is important," Grantham said. "We have somebody there 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
The 13,500-square-foot expansion, beside Baron Services' current building at 4930 Research Drive, is expected to be completed in March and will double the size of the company's headquarters. The cost of the project was not disclosed.
Goodwyn Mills and Cawood Inc. designed the expansion.
(same firm that is doing the Constellation project downtown. The well respected arch firm HQ in Montgomery) Pearce Construction is the general contractor.
Baron Services provides a wide range of weather sensing, weather display and meteorological analysis tools, and is the first company to provide a television product plotting a storm's location, extrapolating its speed and direction of movement to estimate its time of arrival. Baron Services pioneered the visual integration of velocity data from multiple radar to calculate and graphically depict wind shear.
The company is one of the largest private users of data bandwidth in the state.
The expansion will support the growth the company has experienced during the past several years and provide the space necessary to construct a state-of-the-art operations center for the company's forecasting, data processing and technical support services.
"I am very excited about the continued growth of our companies," said Bob Baron, president and CEO. "By doubling the size of our facility, we will be able to better serve our customers' needs for years to come."
Baron, a local TV meteorologist, started the company in 1990. It has nearly 100 employees spread across locations in Huntsville, Oklahoma, Florida and North Carolina.
Last October, Baron received a National Weather Service Special Achievement Award. Baron Services' WxWorx and XM Satellite Radio's XM Weather received a 2005 Flying magazine's Editors' Choice Award. In 2004, Baron was a finalist for Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year.