#Weather was formed on Austnet on the 8th January, 1999, when it became apparent that Australian weather enthusiasts needed their own chat channel. Prior to this, the only other main #weather chat channel was over on Undernet, dominated by Americans, where a few of us chatted, and where some of us still chat today.

The American version of #weather was first formed in 1995 as #neweather (north-east USA) on the efnet network, by late 1995 it had moved to undernet and the name had changed to #weather.

In early 1996 the first Australians appeared on undernet #weather, they were wizwx (Jacob), NRiverswx (Michael) and banditt (Ira). This pretty much stayed the same in 1997, until June, 1998, when wizwx organised weekly meetings on the undernet #weather channel by emailing Australian weather website authors, in which we got a small group of people attending the meetings each week.

In September, 1998, thanks to netdave, the Aussie-Weather mail list was formed, the list grew faster than any of our expectations, and we saw that there was a lot of Australians out there that were interested in weather. By December, 1998, with the amount of people on the list, gave some the idea to form a weather association, which happened soon after and was named the Australian Severe Weather Association (ASWA), in which nearly all of us are members.

On the 8th January, 1999 it was decided we needed our own chat channel, instead of choosing to form a new channel on the already lagged undernet IRC network, we decided go to Austnet, which is also a worldwide network, but has a lot less lag and netsplits.

The weekly meetings then changed over to our new home on austnet #weather, but soon after the channel grew larger, and now the weekly meetings are no more, because each day and night is like the old weekly meetings, but with a lot more people.