Friday 12 December 2008 — This is 16 years old. Be careful.
Living in New England, and working far from home, predicting winter weather is very important. It really sucks to have an hour commute home turn into a three-hour drive because of a snow storm. At Tabblo, we used to have a weather fanatic who would give us detailed forecasts and help us avoid the bad days. Without him, we have to do our own predictions, and we’re still learning the ropes. We almost got into a freezing rain situation yesterday which luckily didn’t materialize.
If you think weather.com has detailed reports, you need to take the red pill and see how far the rabbit hole goes. The National Weather Service has incredibly detailed hour-by-hour charts for your zip code. Navigating is a bit rough though: enter your zip code in the box on the left, you get to a page about the area. Near the bottom right is an Hourly Weather Graph link. You should get to a page that looks like this one for Marlborough MA.
It was this graph that convinced me yesterday that although it was going to be close, the rain wouldn’t actually freeze, and it didn’t, it was an uneventful drive home. Thanks federal tax dollars!
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An article on Rick Santorum's NWS position:
http://www.slate.com/id/2123557/
One of my favorite Hurricane Center Forecast Discussions of all time, describing the "in-house discussion" of whether the re-intensification of the low into which Ivan had disintegrated deserved to get the name "Ivan" back:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2004/dis/al092004.discus.067.shtml
If you are in Boston, you could call 617-567-5762 for KBOS ASOS, for example.
Punch in weather.gov/ followed by your zipcode into your browser's address bar. You'll be redirected to the weather page for that zipcode.
For example, for Marlborough's weather:
weather.gov/01752
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=marlborough,%20ma&wuSelect=WEATHER is for the Marlborough, MA area.
Also, though not the same, I look forward to more visualization via tools like Stormpulse.com and other clever integrations.
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