WARNING! Dead links
ahead!
The links in this page were gathered, collated, carefully tested
for correctness many, many years (decades?) ago. Most of them are now
either broken due to corporate acquisition, consolidation, and web
site refactoring (theirs, not mine). When I get time I may try to overhaul the content
and the links, but for now, caveat lector!
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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.
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Caution: Several of the commercial
websites referenced on this page offer ads on their web pages;
these may be syndicated from elsewhere. Such ad syndicate
streams may be prone to malware injection, in particular the
"fake anti-virus popup" variety, at times. Use of a browser
such as Firefox, with
NoScript and ad-blocking addons will reduce this risk, as
will membership in some sites where a benefit of such
membership is "no ads".
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ROAD CONDITIONS
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The University of Michigan's Space Physics Research Lab
operated a weather underground accessible via telnet for many years.
It got spun off into its own company, became more sophisticated, even
generated a network of amateur weather stations and a vital and dynamic
community of weather enthusiasts, with an emphasis on photos from said
enthusiasts. It used to have celestial views, and their visible satellite
imagery was also good, being superimposed on a very clearly marked terrain
image of the underlying land mass. The radar maps were directly from are
NexRad, and the animations used to be much more
fine-grained in time than any other weather animation elsewhere.
Alas, they got bought out by the Weather Channel, and most of the good
things mentioned above gradually disappeared. The community is gone, the
community photo archives deleted, the
direct nexrad maps replaced by the "wundermap", which while OK, has lost
some of the immediate visual acuity of the nexrad based maps. Also, the
forecasts now seem to mirror those of the weather channel, so one can't
really regard them as an independent source of predictions. RIP,
wunderground, we remember you as you used to be. :-(
I've removed the link table that used to be here on the right, as pretty
much all of them were broken last time I checked.
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The Weather Channel (weather dot com) is definitely a more commercial
site than many, but I've heard they use Linux very widely behind the
scenes (so they can't be all bad! Besides, Cantori is cool).
They do 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 (alas, now part of the Weather Channel) and USWX
(alas, RIP, 1997-2020); a second opinion is always a
good idea; corporate merging works directly against that).
The links below may or may not work.
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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 then commercial.
Alas, the site was closed down in 2020 after a good 23 years
of service. While they were running,
they provided 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 (intellicast also taken
over by the weather channel - detect a theme?). Localities were
highlighted when special weather conditions prevail there.
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(table removed, links no longer work)
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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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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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MISCELLANY...
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).
InfraRed and Visible Satellite Images
Hurricane Season
(Old) Stuff I've not checked yet
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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