Want to melt down your Web browser's search engine? Then punch in weather as a keyword, and watch the number of hits pile up. For example, I tried this once using Yahoo! — one popular search engine — and came up with 3,188 sites that deal with weather. The Internet contains a staggering number of Web sites that address weather in many, many forms. Want to know more about El Nino, look at the weather's influence on crop production, or find out more about global warming? Then there's sure to be a site for you.
This same kind of rich variety of information can also be found in the realm of aviation weather. While a complete list of Web sites for aviation weather is impossible, given the sheer number of sites and the space limitations here, I can provide a nice list that you can use to get your weather surfing off to a good start. Besides, you'll find links aplenty in each of these sites. Click on these and you'll no doubt find other sites of special interest to you. And it's all free — unless you want to count the monthly fee that you pay your internet service provider. We're not addressing DUATs, flight planning software, or the commercial vendors of weather information in this article. Those are subjects for upcoming articles.
Here we go:
- www.aopa.org
AOPA members are eligible to receive a free password and user ID that will allow you into the "members only" section of our Web site. This lets you scope out DTN's weather information. This is the same vast information pool — including radar animations — that you'll find at so many DTN weather terminals installed at FBOs around the nation. - www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/Aviation_Weather_Center.html
This is obviously the Aviation Weather Center's site, and it's definitely worth checking out. You'll see all of the aviation weather products, plus some great satellite shots. These include the latest GOES-8 and GOES-9 imagery that has the capability of detecting fog. Mountain wave forecasts are also on this site. - www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/Neural_Net_Icing.html
You can reach this site via a link within the site mentioned above, but I add it as a separate entry because it shows new, experimental icing forecast graphics. It's experimental now, but by next winter this product could well be operational. - www.intellicast.com
Intellicast puts out some very nice radar imagery that you can animate to watch storms or precipitation movements over the past few hours. Click on various regions and cities of the United States and you can watch the local radars, which give you more detailed views. General weather information is also available, so if you're looking for that allergy alert, this is the place. Weather for the rest of the world is also available, but it's in a public weather format — no METARs, TAFs, or radar images. Incidentally, WSI and other commercial weather providers use Intellicast's radar imagery. But go direct to the source — and it's free. - http://tgsv7.nws.noaa.gov/weather/
This is the National Weather Service's Internet Weather Source. It's OK for calling up METARs for certain sites, but that's about it. METARs and daily weather observations for foreign locations are also available. - http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/graphicsversion/bigmain.html
A site run by NOAA as part of its Interactive Weather Information Network, this will give you some nice links to weather videos, user-definable satellite shots of the western hemisphere, plus weather warnings and other standard weather information fare. This site lets you print out any tornado or severe thunderstorm warning without having to forage through a huge DUATS file. - http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/model.html
You've heard about forecast models from television weatherpersons. Now you can look them up on this site. It's run by the Research Applications Program (RAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Models such as the Eta, RUC, and Global Spectral will interest those with advanced formal meteorological training. For pilots, the Aviation model is the one to click on. Real-time and near-real-time radar and upper-air information are also available. Another site — http://wxp.atms.purdue.edu/aviation/ — run by Purdue University, also carries aviation model forecasts. - www.rap.ucar.edu/largedrop/integrated/
Another RAP site, this one features great icing forecast graphics, complete with icing bases and tops. Locations of the especially dangerous, large-droplet icing conditions are also plotted. Though these products are experimental, they have nonetheless proven very helpful as adjunct information to FAA preflight weather briefings. Another RAP site — www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/aviation.html — gives some fairly nice graphic depictions and plots of areas of turbulence; icing; and areas of VFR, MVFR, or IFR weather. - http://covis.atmos.uiuc.edu/java/weather0.5/
A site maintained by the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, this is a do-it-yourself weather map. By checking your preferences, you can superimpose any combination of satellite imagery, frontal positions, radar returns, isobars, isotherms, and other items on a map of the United States. Neat feature: Move the cursor over the clouds on the satellite imagery and you'll see cloud top temperature readouts in a small inset window. No clouds? The window shows surface temperatures. Not-so-neat feature: Sometimes the applet that runs all this neat stuff doesn't work. My home computer can run this applet, but the one at the office stares back at me with a blank screen where the map should be. Hello, Bill Gates? - http://covis.atmos.uiuc.edu/covis/visualizer/satellite.html
This site gives you another way of superimposing radar summary information on satellite images. You can choose the latest imagery, or seek out archived images that are up to 15 hours old. Other links in the "visualizer" offer upper-air, surface observations, and forecast information. - http://elf.gi.alaska.edu/sprites.html
Think lightning only comes out of the bottom of storm clouds? Check out this site for a gander at sprites — columns of brightly colored electrical discharges that erupt from the tops of thunderstorms and extend well beyond the tropopause. We learned about them only after space shuttle pilots couldn't believe what they were seeing, then recorded them. Now scads of researchers are penning their Ph.D. dissertations on them.
Sites such as these can provide you with two important benefits. Most important, they can serve as terrific sources of information that can help you interpret or embellish flight service or DUATS briefings. There's a definite educational advantage, too. If you ever wanted more information or were curious about how forecasts are developed, these and other sites can certainly fill the bill. Start your weather surfing, and soon you'll discover just how much preflight weather information you can gather. It approaches information overload.
The only downside is that some sites seem to change their addresses, or disappear completely, overnight — a problem that's Web-wide, I'm told. There were some sites run by Purdue University and Ohio State University that I used to visit, for example. But one day, poof! Gone. If you know where they went, let me know.
E-mail the author at [email protected].
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