Weather beacon
beacon that indicates the local weather forecast
A weather beacon is a beacon that indicates the local weather forecast in a code of colored or flashing lights. Often, a short poem or jingle accompanies the code to make it easier to remember.
The beacon is usually on the roof of a tall building in a central business district, but some are attached to towers. The beacons are most commonly owned by financial services companies and television stations and are part of advertising and public relations programs. They provide a very basic forecast for the general public and not as an aid to navigation.
In addition to displaying weather forecasts, some weather beacons have been used to signal victory or defeat for a professional sports home team.
History
Precursors
In 1898 on the orders of U.S. president William McKinley, coastal warning display towers were installed along the coast of the United States. In 1936, the Weather Girl sculptures were installed in City Hall Square in Copenhagen. In 1938, Douglas Leigh designed a Coca-Cola billboard with a weather forecast display at Columbus Circle in New York City.
Weather beacons
The first attempt to create a weather beacon as a form of advertising was from Douglas Leigh, who, in 1941, arranged a lighting scheme for the Empire State Building to display a weather forecast code with a decoder to be packaged with Coca-Cola bottles.
“Weather beacon” enters the record as beacon that indicates the local weather forecast. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Weather, beacon and indicates can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7978232. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1936, 1938 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Weather beacon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.