There’s a series of classic lines in the movie Airplane that comes to mind when you hear one company's plan to relaunch its online presence this week: “Looks like I picked a bad week to quit drinking/smoking/sniffing glue.” But in the Weather Underground’s case, this might just be the perfect week to roll out a new website.

The site, Wunderground.com, goes live today with a new appearance that makes stronger use of weather-forecasting technology that relies heavily on amateur weather stations. As luck would have it (and for weather fans, bad stuff outside can be gold inside), this might just be the worst single day of weather in a long time—ice in the South, blizzards in the Midwest, a mix of snow and ice in the Northeast. Plus, there's the threat of a catastrophic cyclone hitting Australia.

Obviously the team behind the Weather Underground—a San Francisco company that borrowed its name from the radical leftist group from the Vietnam War era—didn’t know that this February 2 would be so dreadful. No, they chose this day for another reason. It’s Groundhog Day, which folklore says is supposed to determine if winter will continue for another six weeks or if there will be an early spring (it’s also a company holiday for Weather Underground).

Given the Groundhog Day hook, it makes sense that this is when Wunderground.com gets its big unveil. The site is going from a dense and cluttered look full of charts and data to a more user-friendly and attractive design to appeal to a larger segment of weather watchers without alienating its core users.

“We’ve taken this time to bring new innovations to weather, and we’re happy to be launching our personal weather-station network with forecasts,” said Chuck Prewitt, the company’s vice president for business development.

Wunderground.com is clearly looking to capture a larger chunk of the online weather space, but it faces a potent opponent with Weather.com, the Web companion for The Weather Channel. Weather.com boasts an audience of more than 42 million unique users. The industry leader in weather information has a few built-in advantages—it's the preloaded weather app on iPhones, it's connected to a big media company with significant resources, and it has the easiest online name to remember.

Prewitt and Richard Lowden, vice president for sales at Weather Underground, don't seem that worried. They cited figures from Quantcast that had Wunderground.com reaching 21.4 million unique visitors worldwide, with 16.4 million of them from the United States. According to Quantcast, the weather sites stack up this way: Weather.com is first and is the 22nd most trafficked site overall and is followed by Wunderground.com (58th), WeatherBug.com (75th), and AccuWeather.com (91st).

What separates the work of Weather Underground from its competitors, Prewitt and Lowden said, is where the company gets its information. Like the other weather sites, Weather Underground uses data from the National Weather Service and other sources like airports. But, unlike the others, according to Prewitt, it relies on a worldwide network of 19,000 active private weather stations that are outfitted with the company’s software. (By comparison, Weather.com advertises a patented and proprietary system called TruPoint that analyzes data from multiple sources and boasts that it can give the user a forecast within a mile of a stated location.)

“This was crowdsourcing before crowdsourcing was even known as a term,” Lowden said. “We’re giving people the opportunity to share the information with their neighbors. We’ve built up a robust community.”

To show why this kind of neighborhood-by-neighborhood weather forecasting has merit, Prewitt suggested looking at the world of sports and he mentioned Wrigley Field in Chicago. “If you’re looking at wind data, you can’t look at O’Hare (Airport) versus Wrigley. One’s on Lake Michigan and the other isn’t, and you’re going to see a vast difference in weather,” he said.

Wunderground isn’t the only product of the Weather Underground. The 34-person company—one-third meteorologists, one-third developers, and one-third sales personnel—also sells weather data to Google, the Associated Press, American Express Travel, and the SABRE airline-reservation system.

The privately held, employee-owned company has no debt and no venture capital financing, Prewitt said. But that hasn’t stopped VC firms from stepping up with offers. “We’ve always had that compelling question we’ve asked people. ‘How would we use the money, and what would you bring expertise-wise to what we’re doing?’ And those two questions have never been adequately answered for us,” he said.

Beyond the new look of Wunderground.com and a push to get more business clients to use the company’s data, not much else is truly that different.

“Our company was founded by meteorologists and computer engineers,” Lowden said. “At our core we are a weather company based in the digital distribution of weather information. Other companies can’t really say the same thing.”

Click here to explore an interactive that examines how weather affects business.

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J. Jennings Moss is editor of Portfolio.com.