Welcome to Pat Murphy's weather page. Here you'll find quick links to weather forecasts, radar maps, hurricanes, and more; it's aimed at being useful for NRAO and ALMA sites. Contact me with suggestions, updates, dead link reports, etc.
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Welcome to Pat Murphy's weather page. Here you'll find quick links to weather forecasts, radar maps, hurricanes, and more; it's aimed at being useful for NRAO and ALMA sites. Contact me with suggestions, updates, dead link reports, etc. |
...for 2009 is here. The prediction seems to be for a "normal" year, whatever that might be. Quiet, hopefully!
THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND |
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The University of Michigan's Space Physics Research Lab
operated a weather underground accessible via telnet for many years.
It's now spun off into its own company, has become more sophisticated,
and Astronomers will definitely appreciate this site over many others
for its celestial views. The visible satellite imagery is also nice,
being superimposed on a very clearly marked terrain image of the
underlying land mass. The radar maps are NexRad, and the
animations are accessible on the radar page (and much more
fine-grained in time than any other weather animation elsewhere).
While they do have ads, you can pay a scant $5 for a year to get access ad-free. I did for two years in a row, and I'm wavering on whether to renew or not... their main competition is a fair bit more expensive. |
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USWX (GEMS/UPENN) |
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A BOFH at Penn State (Jeff Wolfe) produced a set of weather pages for the US, originally at Penn State Earth & Mineral Sciences but now gone commercial. They still provide easy access in an intuitive way to information on where severe weather statements have been issued, and to other resources such as the intellicast maps. Localities are highlighted when special weather conditions prevail there. |
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THE WEATHER CHANNEL |
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I don't know whether to praise them or cuss at them! For one, you probably need to allow their cookies. Somewhat irritating given the potential invasion of privacy. But on the other hand, their gold service (which one has to pay for, about $20 a year IIRC) is actually pretty decent (disclaimer: I was a subscriber to their service for a year or so; I let it lapse some months ago). I'm undecided as yet whether it was as good value for money as the weather underground, but as the latter uses micro$oft servers and the weather channel uses Linux, I have an obvious predisposition towards the latter! Despite the annoyances, they have plenty of useful resources, and their forecasts are in my experience more accurate than most (and often somewhat different from the National Weather Service forecasts you get through the Weather Underground and USWX; a second opinion is always a good idea). |
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INTELLICAST |
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Despite being proxy-unfriendly, they do have some pretty nifty radar maps (though they're not updated as often as the weather underground, I think). The radar summaries in particular are noteworthy for clearly showing tornado and severe thunderstorm watches, as well as the direction vectors, heights, and possible mesocyclone activity around large storms. I have not updated or checked these links in years, so it's likely they no longer work. |
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UNISYS |
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What used to be the Purdue Weather Processor (home of the WX software) is now run by Unisys. Their emphasis is more technical and meterological than glitzy, and I for one appreciate that! They have a lot more than I show here (satellite IR and Visible images, forecasts, USGS products, etc). |
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The Purdue Weather Processor (WXP) has lots of weather goodies, including a nice combination of IR-map, radar, and current condition. Here's a shortcut to their Surface Map.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign now has, among other things, a Custom Weather Visualizer, which is a non-Java version of the old "WX Gifs to go" that some of you may remember from a few years ago. You might also want to check out their Java Prototypes (I believe the java code on this page can be trusted, but caveat emptor... if you normally run your browser with both java and javascript disabled, as I do, remember to disable them again when you're done looking at this demo). There is more at this site that I've not had time to investigate.
Michigan State University used to have a page devoted to Current Weather Maps/Movies, with neat visible/IR satellite images of just about everywhere. However, as its owner said, it was time; they were showing their age, having dated from those "good old" days back in 1993 when Mosaic was the only game in town. Now he's referring people to the Space Science and Engineering Center, specifically their RealTime Data page (commercial users requested to give a donation for data used therefrom).
At the Science Museum of Virginia (in Richmond), I found a handout with several interesting web links some years ago. I've glanced at some of them -- in their computer lab, where they have decently configured systems with games, encyclopaedia, and web browsers -- but not for long enough to comment on content or utility. They may be fascinating, or merely interesting. Some are, no doubt, gone to that final resting place in cyberspace for dead links...
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