Mike Gibson, one of the brains behind Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, and owner of several computer graphics patents, is a self-winding individual.

He likes to do what he likes to do. And one of the things he likes to do is follow weather.

Courtesy Michael Gibson (ENLARGE)

This weather image from a tornado in 1999 illustrates what Mike Gibson's program can show.

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His father was an Air Force navigator who worried about storms and talked about radar.

When Gibson moved from Seattle to Atlanta in 1996, he discovered, to his delight, that there was plenty of interesting weather here.

In 1998, he tried tracking some severe storms, but the "standard" online radar information stymied his efforts.

"I looked around and found out where the data was coming from and wrote a program to read that data," said Gibson, 44, relaxing at his home office in Suwanee.

With just a few improvements, that program, called GRLevelX, now has eyeballs popping out of their sockets all around the country. Storm trackers, National Weather Service meteorologists, hobbyists and television stations, including WSB TV, use Gibson's application to show three-dimensional animated images of storms boiling up, dropping hail and spawning funnel clouds.

In other words, a program that an amateur meteorologist cobbled together in his spare time is now part of the massive weather-prediction industry.

"Absolutely astounding," says Glenn Burns, chief meteorologist at WSB. "It takes National Weather Service radar and turns it into what would be compared to a CAT scan or an MRI. You can see updrafts, downdrafts, funnels — it depicts the hail size in great detail, and several times we watched the hail actually drop out of

the storm and hit the

ground. The wow factor is just, wow."

Television viewers who watched last week's storms would recognize Gibson's images.

He takes what were once flat, two-dimensional pools of colors and pumps them up into bulging, three-dimensional figures.

At the Severe Storms Research Center in the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Gibson's software is running "24-7," according to deputy director John Trostel.

"It's my primary application for looking at radar data," said Trostel. "You can do the same thing Glenn Burns is doing."

In fact, because Gibson's software is affordable to the individual user, many amateur meteorologists are doing just that.

Weather radar information is gathered by the federal government, which is obliged to make it available to the public at little or no charge. The information, however, is an unreadable stream of ones and zeroes. Companies that interpret that data and reinforce it with information from local Doppler radar installations charge large amounts of money for their services — in the realm of five and six figures.

Unfortunately for them, Gibson invested in Microsoft stock early on, and doesn't need to charge an arm and a leg for his products. His software costs less than a new video game platform, or about $80 for the entry-level application and $250 for the "analyst's" version.

"It replaces products that cost 10 times as much, and some of them cost 10 times as much every month," said Trostel.

Gibson is active on the message boards and informal meetings of his fellow amateur meteorologists — they call each other "weather weenies" — and four years ago he posted an early version of the program online for his buddies to try. He has also staged presentations for the National Weather Service and other organizations.

"Everybody is familiar with the software," said Steven Nelson, science and operations officer at the National Weather Service in the Peachtree City field office. "They're aware of it, and when they're out on their own storm chasing, they use that software on their laptops."

Gibson's hobby has become a sort of full-time job — though he does no marketing or advertising and can't even name all of his high-profile customers. In fact, the customers that tend to intrigue him the most are guys like the pair at the University of Nebraska who want him to retrofit GRLevelX so it can provide real-time information on a radio-controlled model airplane that they plan to fly into storms. The money? Minimal.

"I thought it was too great an idea," said Gibson. "I didn't get into this for the money."

Gibson hasn't done any storm-chasing of his own, but he's been in fortuitous situations several times. Last winter, when he was snorkeling off the Cayman Islands with his wife, Cyntra, and their daughter, Emily, 8, he snapped a shot of their smiling faces with a waterspout about a mile in the background.

Emily and Dad are going storm-chasing together — as soon as she turns 10.