The weather resources on the Internet are many and varied. They
range from highly sophisticated dedicated sites to national newsfeeds
that produce fairly comprehensive weather reports, to regional news
organizations that feature weather as part of their online news service.
These can be from TV and radio stations or local newspapers. In
addition, the major search engines have a weather feature that allows
you to consult for forecasts in your local area.
In
all cases, however, their weather information is gathered principally
from national sources - in almost all cases, the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. We're going to review here the
principal dedicated weather sites online, and give a quick critique to
what the search engines and national news sites provide.
Perhaps the best known dedicated commercial weather site is http://www.weather.com,
a spin-off of the cable television network The Weather Channel. This
website allows you to punch in your zip code for local weather, or a
city/town name for some other location. The site will give you
temperature readings, wind chill and precipitation forecasts. It will
provide forecasts on an hour-by-hour basis, for the weekend, and will
peer into the future with a ten-day forecast on one page. Graphics
include satellite photos and Doppler radar representations of storm
movements.
Much of this information is gathered from the NOAA's
National Weather Service website. Here you will find "official" U.S.
weather, marine, fire and aviation forecasts, warnings, climate
forecasts and information about meteorology at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/.
The NOAA has a massive network of weather stations nationwide,
providing readouts for highly localized areas. It's also user friendly,
with a wealth of visual information provided by satellites and other
graphics tools. There is a vast amount of marine weather data available
here as well.
The Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com) is a
spin-off of the University of Michigan's weather website. Weather
Underground is a commercial site peppered with advertising that presents
its forecasts based on zip code, city, or on a clickable U.S. map. It
also has international forecasts - click by country - and a
comprehensive list of maps on its home page that show national trends
for such factors as temperature, wind, visibility, precipitation, snow
depth, etc. Register with them and send ten dollars and they'll email
you your daily forecast.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's weather lab: http://cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet/
is among the pioneers of online weather products. Currently, they
maintain a quality national weather forecast site - but perhaps their
most valuable resource for weather addicts is their list of 300 links to
weather related sites.
Intellicast (www.intellicast.com) is an
advertiser supported national site that will also email you your daily
forecast. Their site offers a clickable map and the usual categories of
satellite and long range forecasts. http://Www.weather.org
is another of the lesser national websites that is exclusively for
weather. Their site has an interesting map of worldwide conditions that
is constantly changing as the center of their homepage. Along with the
usual localized and national weather feeds, the site offers weathercams,
tides and currents, and commentary from the Farmers Almanac.
Other dedicated locations include http://www.AccuWeather.com and http://www.Weatherbug.com.
Weatherbug offers downloadable software that provides your local
weather forecast and weather report. Yahoo and Google both provide
weather forecast features, as do the national news feeds.
CNN.com/WEATHER will provide international weather news and five day
forecasts by location. USA Today has global forecasts and information on
meteorological topics such as global warming at:
[http://asp.usatoday.com/weather/weatherfront.aspx].
Finally,
Unisys has chosen to showcase its Weather Processor analysis software
package by building a website for global weather information at http://weather.unisys.com/.
Not something you'd expect just lookinf at their main homepage.
Apparently even people who do tech consulting and enterprise servers
need to know if it's going to rain.
Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate for
ApolloHosting.com. She brings years of experience as a small business
consultant to helping prospective clients understand the ways in which a
website may benefit them both personally and professionally. Apollo
Hosting provides website hosting [http://www.apollohosting.com],
ecommerce hosting [http://www.apollohosting.com/e-commerce], vps
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