Sunday, February 16, 2003

Weather I admit that I'm a bit of a weather junkie. I like looking at lots of raw and not-so-raw atmospheric data to figure out what I'm in for for the next few days. There are a number of great resources online for watching the weather. The Weather Channel has a fairly decent site. A bit ad heavy and sometimes hard to find what you are looking for, but does provide a nice iconic overview of the coming weather. For tropical weather-- for tracking major oceanic storm systems-- nothing beats Weather Underground's Tropical Weather. The rest of that site is just good, the tropical weather section is awesome. In particular, when there is an active tropical storm, hurricane or cyclone, clicking through to the storm details offers an option to show historical information that includes all of the tracks of various tropical storm systems that passed within 100 miles of the current storm's location. The absolute best resource for North American weather information is the National Weather Service. It contains all of the raw and summarized information that the Weather Channel and the other weather news organizations use to create their content. Everything from marine advisories through to precipitation amounts to tide forecasts is available. The local summary maps are excellent (that link clicks through to my area of the country). However, the coolest local forecast feature is the experimental graphical forecast. Through the use of one very gnarly bit o' JavaScript, you can roll over that map and see exactly what is coming for your area in terms of temperature, preciptation, winds, humidity, dewpoint, and sky cover. All of the maps feature navigational elements that let you jump to other radar/weather monitoring centers in any given direction, if available. 1:36:16 PM