Brain Candy #74 - How's the Weather on the Web? - Part 1

I noticed the geese were beginning to migrate today, so it's fitting that I should write a weather article. As I promised last month, I worked through the weather website list that Craig Wilson brought back from the AG in July. I don't have anyone other than Craig to attribute it to; it turned out to be a rich source of info on weather websites. I've combined what I thought were the best sites from it with some that I knew about, and some that I found while surfing. There are many sites I'll be mentioning - too many for even one article. If you're a weather nut like me, you'll like what you see when you visit them.

Before I proceed any further, I want to make an important point. Northeast Ohio has frequent bouts of severe weather. It can be dangerous here, and there is no substitute for a good weather radio to keep you safe. You're unlikely to find a good one in the local big box retailer or "shack;" construction and features will be lacking. Catherine and I own a Maxon WX-80. It seems to be discontinued now, although we were still able to buy one recently as a gift. You can find a downloadable user's manual for it at www.topaz3.com/Manuals/WX-80.pdf. Use the features list as a guide and make sure you get a weather radio that has the best features of the WX-80. In particular, you'll want a radio that can deal with Specific Area Message Encoding (S.A.M.E.) technology. All but the very simplest weather radios will alert you to local National Weather Service alerts, watches and warnings, but without S.A.M.E. capability, they will alert you to ALL of them in your area. I can tell you from personal experience, in the middle of the night, you don't want to hear alerts every 15 minutes for points 50 miles east of you. That weather has passed you. You would like a radio that knows you want to ignore anything from any but a few selected areas, usually counties. That's what S.A.M.E. technology does - you define what areas you want to hear emergency alerts for, and everything else is suppressed. Say for instance, that you only want to hear alerts for Summit County, Ohio. You program your weather radio to ignore any S.A.M.E. code but "039153," which is Summit County's S.A.M.E. code. You'll actually want to include surrounding counties too, and maybe some counties further to the west of your location, since you want to know what will be coming soon. Typical S.A.M.E. receivers can handle 15 codes or so, which is enough considering the typical weather station's range of 40 to 50 miles. You can find the S.A.M.E. codes at the National Weather Service NOAA Weather Radio site at www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/nwrsame.htm.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is the hero of this article, since most of the sites I'll be discussing are NOAA sites. NOAA has, in my experience, been perhaps the most creative, innovative and useful developer of U.S. federal government websites. I already knew of a number of their sites before Craig passed the AG list on to me, and from it, I found out about a number of others. I just typed in the base address www.noaa.gov, just to see what I would find, and found more new stuff.

As you move beyond the NOAA base site, you might find yourself visiting the National Weather Service site at www.nws.noaa.gov, the Storm Prediction Center site at www.spc.noaa.gov, or the National Hurricane Center site at www.nhc.noaa.gov. I'm sure there are others - NOAA seems to be composed of many sub-agencies. The National Weather Service is perhaps the best place to start drilling down. If you go to iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/graphicsversion/rbigmain.html, you'll access the high-bandwidth version of the NWS Interactive Weather Information Network InfoCenter. If you have a slower network connection, you'll want to go to the medium bandwidth version of the site; just change "rbigmain.html" to "bigmain.html" in the address above iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/graphicsversion/bigmain.html. This version of the site has graphical icons, but not animated ones. This page shows six graphics of the continental US, as well as buttons and links to visit other parts of the site. The icons represent links to satellite photos, live weather maps and states where severe weather conditions exist. This latter icon is in the middle graphic in the bottom row, and can be very useful when you want to track national occurrences of bad weather. You can also visit this site directly by going to iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/iwdspg1.html. From there, you can click on the image of any state shown in yellow or red to view the watches and warnings active for that state. You can also click on any of the states to view its normal weather information.

Another National Weather Service site you might want to visit is www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/graphical/sectors/eastgrtlakes.php, which includes some interesting experimental graphics displays of weather conditions in the Eastern Great Lakes. You can also visit www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/graphical/, which is the national version of this site. For severe weather information specific to Ohio, go to iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/oh/warnings.html. If you want to review yesterday's national severe weather (or severe weather from any particular day in the last several years), go to www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/reports/yesterday.html. General weather information for most of our region can be found from the Cleveland Forecast office at www.erh.noaa.gov/cle/.

That's it for NOAA sites. Next month's article will discuss some interesting non-governmental weather sites for you to visit, and maybe a few other government sites I may find between now and then.