The National Weather Service provides some exceptional, on-line resources to see what the weather is around the country. The site this one is from is for Doppler radar weather maps. There’s a button on this page that lets you watch the weather patterns change over the past hour. Click on the map for local details. Now this is the kind of thing the interwebitubes excels at providing!
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Cool, it’s not a youtube video.
If you wander through the site, you’ll find that you can get point forecasts for your zip code – including doppler radar and sat views. Then, save the page as a bookmark and you can always access the latest for your area.
Small suggestion: choose composite reflectivity instead of base reflectivity for the radar imaging before you save the bookmark.
moss:
Interesting, I don’t know many folk who prefer the composite reflectivity. I’m curious, why do you prefer it?
Myself, I like base reflectivity, as it gives a more accurate picture of what’s actually hitting the ground. If I need to see higher up, I usually go to Weather Underground to see individual elevation slices. I do rather like being able to see the elevation slices for Storm Relative Mean Radial Velocity.
Here in So. California, we really don’t have much in the way of weather….it’s nice but BOH-ring. The typical forecast consists of: Low clouds and marine layer burning off by mid-day, with cool evening to follow. You could pretty much repeat that for any day of the year.
natefrog – in my neck of these (very mountainous) woods, base reflectivity offers too many images that have little to do with the weather. With composite I get a clearer picture of the stuff that’s moving.
Try the Weather Underground:
http://www.wunderground.com/
$5 a year drops all the ads. Wunderground gets all their information from NOAA, but their site is easier to use. You can set up “favorites” which are cities and towns for which you need weather information on a regular basis.
I use both sites. NOAA shows warning boxes. Weatherunderground has a good zoom feature and also has a really cool feature called Storm Tracks. Very useful if you have vortex signatures or hail cells going on (which we’ve been getting plenty of this summer).
As I’m typing this that band across southern MN is caused a ton of flooding. The Rochester area received 10″ of rain overnight. People traveling pulled off and filled the hotels, then later the hotels were getting evacuated.
I think the photo section of wunderground is worth a look or two.
moss:
That makes sense. I live in Nebraska, so base reflectivity works really well here.
Site admins: Could you authorize one of my posts on this thread that got blocked as being spam? Thanks!
I use the NOAA local loop image as my background on my desktop. Alway good to know when a storm is coming!
Al
For those of us using Firefox, there’s always Forecastfox (enhanced version) which provides something similar, but much easier to access when you want. All you need do is configure it to show 640×480 animated radar, and you never need think about it again.
Looks like my previous post is lost in anti-spam land…
Another cool NWS site: Storm Prediction Center
Invaluable if you want detailed info about severe weather events and watches.
Once you get a base or composite local radar view, click “loop”. Then, a left click will zoom in where you point, a right click will zoom out. As I pilot, I’ve used this for several years, it only gets better year after year. Yay NOAA, tax dollars spent on something worthwhile.
The FAA also has a great weather site, you could give it a try:
http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov/