Weather junkies cheer 20th birthday of Weather Channel

ATLANTA - They delight in watching the kinks in the jet stream. They follow wind-chill readings the way baseball fans keep track of batting averages. They know what ``dewpoint&#39;&#39; means. <br> <br> The Weather Channel has made weather junkies out of some TV viewers. <br> <br> One of them is Andre Trotter, a 23-year-old computer engineer from Lexington Park, Maryland. <br> <br> Trotter says, ``I can watch it for six to eight hours at a time, easy. There are a trillion different ways things can happen. You can never get bored with the weather.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> This month, the weather junkies&#39; 24-hour cable TV fix celebrates 20 years on the air. <br> <br> Since its first broadcast on May second, 1982 -- when a forecaster welcomed viewers to ``the non-ending weather telethon&#39;&#39; -- The Weather Channel has spread to 85 million U.S. homes and earned a place in American pop culture. <br> <br> Its Web site, among the 20 most popular in America, gets more than 350 million hits a month. From the channel&#39;s headquarters outside Atlanta, it beams forecasts to cell phones, pagers and handheld computers. <br> <br> All of which makes obsessive fans of The Weather Channel -- people who just aren&#39;t satisfied with three minutes on the 6 o&#39;clock news -- very happy. <br> <br> A Michigan chef who watches for hours a day, John Manga, says ``I guess it&#39;s the fact that it&#39;s so live, so now. Even at a young age, instead of watching MTV, I started watching The Weather Channel.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> Forecasters at the network say its success lies partly in its availability. National Weather Service forecasts, tailored for hundreds of U.S. cities, are presented six times an hour. <br> <br> But they also believe viewers rely on their calm, studied presentation of the weather, even in severe events like hurricanes and blizzards that send some local TV news anchors into hysterics. <br> <br> Dennis Smith, who has worked on-air at the network sinces its birth, said ``It&#39;s not about violence. It&#39;s not about sex. It&#39;s not about wars. It&#39;s not about the economy. And yet it&#39;s something that could make an impact on their lives.&#39;&#39;