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.

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


THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND

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.

Charlottesville, VA Summary Local Radar Radar loop Regional Radar Fullscreen Satellite
Green Bank, WV
(140-ft)
Summary Local Radar Radar loop Fullscreen Satellite
Socorro, NM Summary Local Radar Radar loop Regional Radar Fullscreen Satellite
Tucson, AZ Summary Local Radar Radar loop Fullscreen Satellite
Santiago, Chile Summary (no radar/satellite yet)

THE WEATHER CHANNEL

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 and USWX; a second opinion is always a good idea).
Area City
Virginia Charlottesville Doppler Radar
West Virginia Green Bank/Hot Springs Doppler Radar
New Mexico Socorro/TorC Doppler Radar
Arizona Tucson Doppler Radar

USWX (GEMS/UPENN)

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.

Area Station (Pressure Map)
Virginia Charlottesville Charlottesville
West Virginia Elkins Elkins
New Mexico Albuquerque Albuquerque
Arizona Tucson Tucson

INTELLICAST

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.

Item USA CV GB AOC TUC
Forecast US CV GB AOC TUC
Radar Summary USA CV GB AOC TUC
Radar USA CV GB AOC TUC
Radar Loop USA CV GB AOC TUC
NexRad BaseReflect USA CV GB AOC TUC
NexRad RadialVelocity USA CV GB AOC TUC
Satellite USA CV GB AOC TUC
Hi-Res Satellite USA
Satellite Loop USA CV GB AOC TUC
24-hr Precipitation USA CV GB AOC TUC
 

UNISYS

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).

US Radar Animation
Atlantic Radar Animation
Southwest Radar Animation

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


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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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