What’s the Weather? Check NOAA!

Growing up in Northeast Nebraska, especially in a small farming community, somehow instilled in me a fascination with the weather. As a kid in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I can remember playing “weather guy” as my friends and I would sit in our treehouse (a REAL one, out in the grove behind our house), looking out at the sky through paper towel tubes we pretended were some type of weather instrument. After I got my drivers license, I can remember racing my car out to a high hill outside the town at any hint of a thunderstorm, just to watch the bad weather pass over the town of 600 and wait for a tornado to drop down. Oh, and don’t get me started about winter. Remember all those heavy snows from the 60’s and 70’s? (”Yes, and we walked 5 miles to and from school, with no shoes, uphill both ways”)

Ok, so my point is, I’ve always thought weather was pretty cool… which leads me to modern times. Now days, we have a 24 hour weather channel, 24 hour cable and local news with weather headlines, and tons of web sites devoted to telling you about your weather. But with all those choices, you know where I spend MOST of my “weather” time? At just one place…. NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration), otherwise known as the National Weather Service.

You know all those warnings and watches that are reported by the local weather guys on TV and radio? Guess where they come from… NOAA! Know where a lot of the local guys weather data comes from? NOAA! And the great thing is, here in Omaha we’re just a few miles away from one of the major NOAA stations in the region, at Valley, NE.

The past two weeks, as endured the first two major snow storms of the season, NOAA kept me up-to-date with what was going to happen, updating their forecasts 2 to 3 times per day, even on the weekends. Text forecasts, weather maps, snowfall maps, radar (typically 5 minutes old), and even their new “multi-media forecast” were all there, 24-7, just waiting for me to access them. And they were especially valuable over the weekend, when most of the local media outlets did (in my opinion) a spotty job of getting us the weather.

Another great thing was that I could access the same weather reports for Yankton, SD, where my folks live. In fact, you can get the weather of any town in the country, at any time of day.

To get started, go to www.noaa.gov, the main, national page. At the upper left, you can enter the name of a city and state to jump to a local forecast. In our example, we’ll use Omaha, Nebraska.

The local forecast page includes both a visual and text weather forecast that goes out over 5 days out, and also includes many links to other forecast and climate maps, as well as radar.

The radar map includes different types of radar, including loops that cover the previous hour. Typically, the radar is not more than about 7 minutes old.

If there is any type of threatening weather in the forecast (watches, warnings, etc.), the local page also includes special “red” links to the latest text narrative describing that forecast. These are the same warnings and watches that the local media stations pickup and use as part of their broadcasts.

At the top, left of the local page, there is a link to the local NOAA office page, that includes a map of the area the office covers. This is my favorite starting page, and is the page that I have bookmarked, since it lets me choose which local city I want to see the forecast for, and also includes links to summary maps, and the “Multimedia Briefings”. The briefings are typically done twice a day, and are provided as video with narration by one of the NOAA weather experts.

In the near future, perhaps even tomorrow, I’ll have a short video tutorial that walks through the site. In the meantime, for anyone who needs a good forecast, or just loves hearing about the weather, I highly recommend you spend some time on the NOAA site.

Tagged as: forecast, Internet, national weather service, noaa, weather, weather forecast