Although pilots shouldn't use the information on the Center's site or on other Web sites in place of their official preflight weather briefing, it can help you understand the information you obtain during a regular briefing. Also, the Web can give you access to the latest aviation weather research, including some of the experimental forecasts that researchers are producing. The address for the Aviation Weather Center site's main home page is www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/
You can easily view all the Web sites listed in this article with relatively low-level computers that have Internet access over regular telephone lines. You don't need the very latest in technology or special, high-speed Internet access. The sites listed here were all visited using Netscape 3.01 on a four-year-old Macintosh Quadra 630 computer, using a 28,800 bps modem and an ordinary home telephone line. The Mac's original eight megabytes of RAM was upgraded to 32 megabytes. This enables the computer to simultaneously run a word processing program (for copying and pasting information from Web sites into a file), a music CD, and the Web, including animated web graphics.
The Aviation Weather Center's Web site is a good place to begin obtaining weather information. Once you reach the home page, you can click on "Aviation Weather Center products" to go to a page of links to forecasts and reports of current conditions. These include all the standard aviation forecasts, such as Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts for individual airports. The direct address for the "products" page is www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/Aviation_Weather_Center.html Besides the regular coded forecasts, you will find links to graphics that display forecast information and explanations of the forecasts.
A new kind of weather product on the Center's site is the "visibility/fog" image using the satellites that watch the eastern and western USA. These begin with the basic satellite images and then add red, blue and white dots to show where airports report instrument flight rules (IFR) conditions, marginal visual flight rules (MVFR) conditions, and visual flight rules (VFR) conditions. The address for the eastern satellite view is www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/goes8e.html For the western satellite view, go to www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/goes9w.html You should also look at the "About this vis/fog image" page for an explanation of how the Center creates these images. This is at www.awc-kc.noaa. gov/awc/visfog.html
Instructors could send students to the Aviation Weather Center site to practice obtaining weather briefings by using real forecasts, without actually contacting a Flight Service Station. Students, and probably many instructors, can learn more about what the forecasts really tell you by clicking on the "Explanation of Forecast Elements" link.
The Research Applications Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, also has a Web site that gives you access to current conditions and forecasts, including some of the Program's own graphics that aren't available on the Aviation Weather Center site.
The real-time weather data part of the site is at www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/aviation.html Here you'll find links to upper air charts, pilot reports (PIREPs), and forecasts, including AIRMETs and SIGMETs alerting pilots to hazards such as icing and turbulence. One useful feature is a list of maps that show you pilot reports for particular hazards at a glance. You can even fill out an online form to have customized PIREP plots made.
More and more local National Weather Service offices are posting aviation forecasts on their Web sites, along with other handy information. The NWS has a Web page with a map of its regions. Clicking on a region will take you to links to NWS offices in that region. This address is www.nws.noaa.gov/regions.shtml The National Weather Service's San Francisco Bay Area office also has a good listing of NWS offices around the country at www.nws.mbay.net/nws.html
One really handy Web site is the Weather Calculator on the El Paso, Texas, NWS office site. With it you can fill in the blanks and have it do meteorological calculations such as density altitude. The site is at nwselp.epcc.edu/elp/wxcalc.html
Research And Experimental Forecasts
Current aviation weather research should lead to better forecasts in the future. The Federal Aviation Administration's Aviation Weather Research Web site is a good place to find out what's going on. It's at www.faa.gov/ AUA/ipt_prod/tower/awr/awr.htm
Some of the key research is being conducted by the Research Applications Program. Its Web site with links to descriptions of the projects and some of the experimental forecasts it produces is at http.rap.ucar.edu/rap.html (Note: The complete address for this site is http://http.rap.ucar.edu/rap.html)
One of the Program's on-going experiments involves trying to develop better icing forecasts. A Web page with information about the experiment and links to the experimental forecasts is at www.rap.ucar.edu/largedrop/
The Aviation Weather Center also produces experimental forecasts for mountain-wave turbulence and also for icing. The mountain wave forecasts are at www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/mwave.html The experimental icing forecasts are at www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/Neural_Net_Icing.html
Weather Education
Students and flight instructors aren't going to find a complete course in aviation weather on the Web. Why would someone do all the work of putting together such a course and then post it on the Web where anyone can look at it for no charge? It makes more sense to put the course in a book or maybe on a CD ROM that you can sell. Still, useful educational material on some aspects of aviation weather is available on the Web.
For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Forecast Systems Lab in Boulder, Colorado, has "The Semi-official Microburst Handbook Home page" with a lot of useful information about the winds that can blast down from showers and thunderstorms. It's atwww-frd.fsl.noaa.gov/mab/microburst/ Welcome.html
The National Weather Service has quite a bit of information on the Web to help pilots understand and use the METAR and TAF codes for current airport weather observations and forecasts. These include:
Frequently asked questions about METAR/TAF - www.nws.noaa.gov/ oso/oso1/oso12faq.htm
Links to decoding software - www.nws.noaa.gov/software/
Conversion tools and aids - www. nws.noaa.gov/oso/oso1/oso12/tools.htm
Airport identifiers - www.nws. noaa.gov/oso/oso1/oso12/siteid.htm
Federal Meteorological Handbook No. 1, which is the official guide to weather observations and codes - www.nws. noaa.gov/oso/oso1/oso12/fmh1.htm
A National Science Foundation Web page has information on converting the international "zulu" time used in all weather observations and forecasts into North American times - atm.geo.nsf.gov/ieis/time.html
The National Weather Service's San Francisco Bay Area office has an education page with links to several Web sites that have weather education materials. Almost all of these sites are intended for elementary, middle school or high school students, but some can be useful for student pilots who are just beginning to learn about weather. This page of links is at www.nws. mbay.net/wx.html#edu
The weather section of the USA TODAY Online site has several graphics and text pages explaining different aspects of weather. These include links to many other Web sites with more information. The pages include density altitude, www.usatoday.com/weather/ wdenalt.htm; humidity and effects of water in the atmosphere, www.usatoday.com/weather/wwater0.htm; storm systems and fronts, www.usatoday. com/weather/wstorm0.htm; thunderstorms, www.usatoday.com/weather/ wtsm0.htm; and how weather forecasting is done, www.usatoday.com/ weather/wforcst0.htm
No book nor any information available via a computer can teach pilots everything they should know about the weather. None of this is a substitute for watching the weather daily and trying to understand what's going on. The World Wide Web, however, gives you quick access to actual observations and forecasts so you can compare them to what you see out the window or what you're likely to see from an airplane's cockpit.
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