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| Crawling around the net with Mike Graham, NE1V |
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| Crawling around the net with Mike Graham, NE1V |
Most of you probably have cable and receive the Weather Channel, but what the hey……you got a computer……might as well make it pay for you. The first site is a NOAA current conditions and forecasting site. The address is: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/data.shtml
From here you can look at current weather conditions around the nation or the world, read analysis and forecasting data for same, and even get the latest marine and satellite observational data. You can even see hourly changes in temperature, BP, RH, etc. when checking "Current Conditions" for the chosen area. Some of the addresses to subsequent pages can get long and convoluted. It is suggested that once you've found areas of interest which you will check frequently, "Bookmark" the page(s). The next site, a facility of the University of Michigan, is run on a search engine that searches by city, state, zipcode, or airport. Its address is: http://blueskies.sprl.umich.edu/search.html
I tried it for both zipcode 03054 (Merrimack) and "Merrimack, NH". Both worked fine and presented me with a table of current information, including temperature, RH, dewpoint, wind, BP, conditions, visibility, sunrise, sunset and Moon phase! The data was centered for Nashua…..close enough. The bottom of the page contains a 2+ day forecast as well as an statewide 5-day extended forecast. It uses icons to represent various expected conditions. Subsequent loadings are extremely fast once most of the icons are in your browser cache.
We must not forget the Weather Channel. They have a great site, but it is more commercial and the city data is not as detailed as the Umich site. The address is: http://www.weather.com
It does load fast and essentially shows much of the same data as on the WX channel. It has some other interesting features and is worth a browse.
Last, but not necessarily least, check out our own Plymouth State College Web site at: http://vortex.plymouth.edu/
The first image loaded is a weather map of the U.S. with the states named. Click on a state, e.g., New Hampshire, and you receive some nice current data and NOAA forecast data. Additionally, there is a nice selection of historical weather data that is fun to browse. One word of caution: the site is designed for frames-capable browsers, i.e. Netscape 3.0 or Internet Explorer 2.0 or better.
Next month we'll look at some sites which might be of interest to the distaff side of our membership. That oughta scramble ya for your Webster's!
73…..de NE1V.