The Boston Globe
Live from their home in the Merrimack Valley, Matt and Danielle Noyes are betting that the future of forecasting is in our pockets.
NORTH ANDOVER — “OK, let’s see if we can do it in one take,” Matt Noyes says as he starts the camera, picks up a small clicker, stands in front of a green screen, and transforms from a normal person into … a weatherman.
“Hi, friends, Matt Noyes here. Good to be with you at the Noyes’ 1Degree Outside Weather Network,” he says in that voice, that TV meteorologist voice, the sort you’ve heard countless times, all those crisp inflections and gentle slides, confident and curious and just happy to be with you.
Maybe you’ve even heard it from Noyes himself during the 20 years he did the morning weather on NBC10 and NECN. And what he’s doing here, in this mostly empty office suite above a nail salon in a higher-end strip mall in North Andover, is basically what he did when he was on television. Three-ish minutes of highs and lows, the marine forecast, and what’s going on in the mountains, peppered with the folksy bits about when you should pack a sweater and what that water temperature is going to feel like if you take a dip.
But this is not TV. No, the 45-year-old quit his dream job as chief meteorologist at a big Boston station, the exact job he’d fantasized about as a kid in Haverhill, when he used to cut out weather maps from the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune and lie in bed delivering forecasts in his head. Instead, he left all that behind to start his own thing, a new thing, which is doing New England forecasts exclusively online. It’s called 1Degree Outside, and he’ll be the first to tell you it’s a huge risk, a keep-you-up-at-night-worrying sorta gamble. But he’s not the only one taking it, and he’s not the only one worrying in that bed.
“That was great,” Danielle Noyes says after her husband wraps up the forecast and loosens his tie. “Well done.”
She’s the other familiar face in this story, a Weymouth girl who vividly remembers her parents taking her to watch Hurricane Bob smash the shoreline when she was 7 years old, the moment she got hooked on the power of mother nature.
She’s 40 now, and another longtime veteran of Boston morning weather. For a while, she was even Matt’s competitor when she was at WBZ. But then she moved to NBC10, they started dating, and one wedding and two children later, they had become something of a power couple in Boston television meteorology. That is until they started wondering if television is still the best medium for forecasting.
Matt has long said that his goal as a meteorologist is to bring the best information to the greatest number of people. So when a poll came out in 2023 showing that less than half of people got their weather from TV, a lightbulb went off.
There was also an alarm going off, the one that sounded at 2 a.m. for the 20 years that Matt did the morning weather.
“My body was feeling the effects of that alarm,” he says.
It had gotten so bad that he was puffing on an inhaler a half-dozen times a day and slipped a disc in his back on the air.
“People claim you get used to it, but a human body is not meant to get up in the middle of the night,” says Danielle, who did her own decade of morning weather. “You get home and if you sit down, you’re done. You have to keep moving until you put the kids to bed. Then you go to bed.”
The hours were taking a toll on their family — 6- and 5-year-old girls, as well as Matt’s 13-year-old son from a previous marriage — and so they began having serious conversations about what it meant to have their dream job. Was there a way they could still do the weather, still stand in front of a green screen and help an audience plan their lives? But do it on their terms, in a way that was better for their family and at a more reasonable hour?
On May 1, with a camera and greenscreen set up in their North Andover home, they officially launched 1Degree Outside. The two of them are the entire staff. And their budget is exclusively what’s in the family bank account.
The Globe launched its own weather team in March to delve into breaking storm coverage, daily and long-range forecasting as well as the science behind our weather patterns.
Three times a day, the couple takes turns delivering a traditional, TV-style forecast, which is also available on YouTube, while the app and website, 1degreeoutside.com, provide their town-by-town forecasts, hour-by-hour for the next 24 days, as well as a 14-day outlook. They also have specific forecasts for each Massachusetts state park. In addition, the company is offering private forecasts for companies with outdoor workers. Unlike algorithm-based weather apps, what they are pitching is a local forecast, crunched by actual meteorolgists with years of experience with New England weather.
It’s a lot for two people, and Danielle still works part-time as a meteorologist for NBC10 and NECN. But in its first month, the site already has exceeded expectations, drawing 540,000 pageviews from 145,000 visitors, according to figures they provided.
Much of that initial momentum can be attributed to the social media followings they built up as TV personalities. But there is still a long way to go toward profitability, and they are well aware that most startups fail because they run out of money. They hope to sell advertising for the forecasting site but expect the bulk of their income will come from selling private forecasts to businesses that need more pinpoint weather information for an exact location, such as a school weighing a costly snow day.
It’s a bold step. And they gave up a lot to take it. And the person most worried about it, Matt says, is his 13-year-old son.
“He was very nervous, and so I told him: I got my dream job once, and the chances of that happening were small. So I’m going to try to do that again, to plan on winning and have faith that everything will fall together,” Matt says.
And then his son gave him advice: He needed to go back to wearing a tie on the air. The “sweater dad” thing he was trying wasn’t working.
“And my son was right,” Matt says.
These days, Matt sleeps in until 4:30 a.m. before he puts on his suit and tie. Then he heads to an office suite they recently moved into and logs long hours at a computer screen full of weather data, while Danielle chips in, often filming her forecasts from the makeshift studio still set up at their house.
“I’ve never been afraid of hard work,” Matt says, as his off-air Haverhill accent slips in and the R’s disappear. He has a loud, barreling voice, but its tinged with the infectious optimism that long endeared him to viewers, and coworkers.
When he left NBC 10, some of his colleagues made him a collage, which he keeps on his desk. In the center they wrote a wish for him: A sunny future with a high chance of sleep.