Weather Links
From John Wright's Sailplane &
Gliding Article, April-May 1998
Updated
February 2003
(Web space and technical assistance donated by Taskfinder Software)
| Forecasts |
Weather pages have
been categorised under the above headings.
Some sites appear under more than
one heading.
If you find any dead links, please notify the author via the link at the end of the page.
They say most people talk about the weather at some point during the day. Glider pilots continually talk about it day and night and forever stare skywards, as it affects our flying so much. But on the Internet, weather is an absolute obsession! As a test, I recently entered weather as a search keyword in Lycos and pulled up 16.33 million page hits. Sex, on the other hand, produced a mere 12.62 million hits. Glad to see the world has got its priorities right. Here's a guide to some of the more useful sites on weather, many of particular interest to glider pilots.
Forecasts
Weather UK is a site I've been using quite a lot recently. You enter the postcode of the airfield and get a current situation report, and a forecast split up into six hour slots. More detail is available breaking it down into shorter time intervals. And instead of just saying rain or showers, you get a probability of rain for each time slot!
The Online Weather Interface: Index is part of Impact Weather Services, a large commercial organisation, based in Scotland and providing specialist forecasts nation wide for the UK plus lots of individual forecasts for a large number of cities and areas. For a fee they'll send a forcast to your mobile phone!
Fair Isle Weather - Links and Northern Isles Weather and ShetlandToday. These three long established and often quoted Scottish pages have many excellent links to weather sites. Synoptic charts for the UK and Europe, various satellite pictures at several wavelengths, the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts, European charts, rain and pressure forecasts for the next three days, an excellent Scandanavian site, several shipping forecast sources, including interactive weather buoys, links to some excellent German pages (some will need a german speaker to be fully appreciated, but don't be afraid to experiment with these links as they will still provide lots of useful information), short and long range forecasts, all useful stuff. I particularly liked the Northern Isles site.
The UK Met Office Home Page has undergone a major series of improvements and offers a variety of services, and most of it is now for free. They give national and regional forecasts, and under regional forecast town forecasts are also included. If you register (for free) there is lots of aviation stuff as well. The amount of free stuff available here has certainly improved a lot since the original article was first written.
The BBC, well known for the quality of their TV and radio forecasts, make them freely available on their site at BBC Weather. There's a lot worth looking at here as well.
The Electronic Telegraph provide forecasts. You have to register with ET, but it’s free. Bookmarks then by-pass the password hassle. They offer a general report, and a few lines extra on several different regions, plus a nice synoptic chart. The Daily Telegraph has always been one of the popular sources of good forecasts, and the electronic version continues the tradition.
The Press Association WeatherCentre presents much the same sort of data as The Electronic Telegraph (but had no synoptic chart the last time I checked). This site has had a major update since the orginal S&G article. THey now offer a service called WeatherCast, where for £1 per minute, a personal tailored forecast is supplied, but the software to view it is free.
NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is definately worth a look, but be prepared to spend some time on-line as there is a lot to examine. This site claims over one billion hits since 1997, so that gives you some idea as to how good it must be! You might come across other NOAA sites with different urls or servers on other links pages. Try them too. The current British Weather at certain locations is here, in case you miss it.
The National Weather Service makes available a multitude of met faxes at Faxes and Other Faxes. All these faxes are stored as TIFF files. These should be downloaded and viewed with a graphics program, and you’ll need to enlarge them to see all the info on offer, which covers America, Mid Atlantic and European areas. (The above NOAA URLs are the updated versions since the magazine went to press.)
WeatherNet is a big American site, and has a list of several hundred other weather web sites (it claims to have one of the largest lists of such links), and you can usually find some useful info via them. At this link you can type in a UK location for a current weather and latest forecast report.
Pilot Magazine’s UK Aviation Weather Page and FLYER Airportal both give many links, some of which are more useful for power and SLMG pilots, such as METARs SIGMETs and TAFs (if you can read such lists) and link to Tom Dawes-Gamble's aviation weather page.
UK glider pilot Mike Cohler offers Mike's Aviation Weather Page with a good set of forecast sites, plus a few for the Yorkshire area, as he flies there. Mike also has an alternative weather page - don't ask me why - mentioned at the bottom of the first one. Watch out for his set of links to Georg Mueller's famous Top Karten site, originally at Karlsruhe Uni., whose url has now changed and is misquoted on several sites. But don't worry our link above is up to date.
A couple of military pages giving free information include http://www.sembach.af.mil/wxcharts/wxcharts.htm and http://www.sembach.af.mil/wxcharts/metsatanal.htm. The first is a list of charts, the second, available on that page anyway, is a meteosat image with the fronts drawn onto the cloud pattern. (These links are currently giving occasional problems.)
Bablake Weather Station describes itself as the definitive weather site for the Coventry area. As well as beiing helpful to Hus Bos pilots, it should also appeal to those in Oxfordshire and surrounding areas, as we often fly up there to show them how it should be done. There are forecasts for Coventry, and the usual set of good weather links.
For those of you with a WAP phone, who are now wondering why you bought it, try this link, www.tagtag.com/wjstar/, curtesy of Ian Molesworth. It gives you the WeatherJack star rating on your mobile phone. To experiment with it on your PC before using it for real, go to http://www.gelon.net/ and enter the above url in the "wapalizer" to get a demo on your PC on the web of the information displayed on your phone on the web that's from the PC on the Web... A similar wap weather service is available from wap.onlineweather.com/, part of Impact Weather Services mentioned earlier. In both cases the trailing / seems to matter.
Just Satellites
The Dundee University Satellite Receiving Station is a major archive of freely available satellite pictures and one of the most linked to sites in the UK. Registration is free (it's to prove that people need this page and use it, to keep up their funding, so please register!)
An alternative to the Dundee site is Nottingham University which deals in Meteosat images with the latest images being available within five minutes of arriving(!). Under their graphical interface there’s satellite images at various wavelengths and a slide show of the last 24 hours’ images (the slide show doesn't work with every browser however, but clicking Reload replays it). They have another satellite page at http://www.satpix.nottingham.ac.uk/ , although the above page contains this link anyway. NOTE - Due to funding difficulties, these two sites are not updating their contents.
For a good high resolution picture of the UK try The University of Karlsruhe in Germany (I know - go to Germany for UK pictures?).
See also the following sites, described in detail in earlier
sections
http://www.sembach.af.mil/wxcharts/wxcharts.htm
http://www.sembach.af.mil/wxcharts/metsatanal.htm
Top
Karten (a direct link to the satellite section),
Fair Isle
Weather - Links and
Northern Isles
Weather for more satellite piccies.
Learn about the weather
If you are going to read all this weather information, it helps if you understand the subject a bit more, doesn't it?
The Birmingham University Educational Resources page provides access to several sources of educational material, including one on all those strange little weather symbols we get on met faxes. and a whole series of on-line learning guides.
Edinburgh University Met. Dept. offers a series of good educational links which may help you. This site offers you some educational software under their FTP option. Have a look in the Documents, Modules, and Tool book sections for a wealth of freely available information, lessons and programs for those with the urge to learn. The CAL and Interactive sections might interest some of you.
The World Wide 2010 Project is a major
project to provide a large number of educational pages. For example:-
The
WW2010 Home Page ,
the On-Line Weather Guides
and How to Read Weather Maps could all be
useful for new soaring pilots!
As will their Other
Educational Met Pages.
These will all be helpful to those with little knowledge of meteorology, as they are not particularly difficult to understand, nor at too advanced a level.
The FLYER Airportal site also has some good information or tutorial pages specifically aimed at pilots.
The News Archive Site lists several FAQ documents (Frequently Asked Questions) on meteorology, and includes long lists of where to get met information of various sorts. These FAQ’s are undated regularly, and the latest version is always available here to download and read at your leisure.
The FAQs page for the uk.sci.weather newsgroup has a lot of good information as well.
You can't ignore the UK Met Office Web Site as it has several educational sections spread throughout its many pages. They often add new sections, but try the feature article on Clouds for starters, and the equally good section on Air masses and Fronts.
Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Page is an educational site run by the chief meteorologist of an american radio station. It’s supposed to be for kids, but has straightforward explanations of weather topics for those who are not scientifically trained but want to understand a bit more. El Nino, severe storms, lightning, tornados, clouds and lots more are discussed, and of course, like all the sites featured here, it has many good links, and has been well reviewed on educational sitesI enjoyed visiting this site.
www.weather.com/education is a comprehensive exploration of the hows, whys and wonders of weather with over 200 pages of unique on-line content designed with educators in mind. This is an online companion to a series of 33, 8 minute commercial-free television episodes. At least that's what it said on their home page, and who am I to argue!
A site based on the book Weather Forecasting for Outdoor Enthusiasts while not exactly aviation orientated, is still a good intro to weather forecasting.
Want to know how the weather works? Try How The WeatherWorks. This is a commercial organisation trying to sell educational material, but there is some free on-line stuff available, under Activities for example.
Carolyn Bierworth's site at www.eagle.ca/~matink/themes.html is part of a large educational site she has established. Your kids will love some of the themes she covers. It includes a link to weather for pilots, weather songs (strange people these met men!), cloud photo sites and many informative educational sites. Her home page is at http://www.eagle.ca/~matink/ where you'll find lots of general educational links.
For those with a more scientific outlook, The Royal Meteorological Society has its own site as well.
A recent find, for me anyway, was Harrison's Weather Pages. Have a look, and learn.
The meteorology course at Bangor University covers many topics at a reasonable level, and should make sense to most readers. Try the British Weather, and Pressure and Winds sections in particular.
See also the Virtual Weather Library, mentioned under monster links, below, for more educational sites.
Monster link sites
Finally, if you want to read a monster list of links on every weather topic under the sun, start with a visit to Roger Brugge's Web Pages These pages are well researched and often quoted. If there's a topic you're interested in that I've not covered, Roger almost certainly has a link to it. If not try some of these ones.
At the British Antartic Survey's site you can find an excellent weather page on Meteorological and Climatic-Type Links. It has a wide variety of links on different topics for those with a more general interest in the weather. There’s even a link to The Ozone Hole and Related Topics (Okay I admit it, I’m a scientist. I can’t help it, it’s the way I was born.) Another ozone site you might care to visit can be found at http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour which is a Cambridge University site on atmospheric science. But don’t let the word science put you off. Science is fun!!
The WWW Virtual Library on Weather has hundreds of links to very good sites, all carefully categorized under 25 headings, many with more than 50 links under each heading. The educational material under K-12 Educational Sites is worth a look. (I admit it, I'm also a lecturer as well as a scientist.) There's several El Nino links. And at the bottom of the page is a link to the WWW Virtual Library on Aviation, at http://macwww.db.erau.edu/www_virtual_lib/aviation.html, which doesn't work any more. These virtual libaries have moved around recently, and only the weather one is still accessible at present.
Ant Veal is/was a Birmingham University research student with a weird name and a great starting point for web weather watchers. Like Roger Brugge, his site gets listed in all the best places, and systematically covers a large number of topics. There's UK forecasts, charts, satellite pictures, universities with meteorology sites, climatology data, metoerology companies, and other stuff. It is very well organised, and independantly he has found many of the sites I’ve listed here (I wonder if he reads S&G?) Go to Ant Veal's Weather Page for lots and lots of info. He has an alternative url (but actually the same site) at http://surf.to/uk.weather.centre which is slightly easier to remember. You are bound to find something useful here, including lots of forecasting links!
Another Birmingham student with a good selection of weather links is Richenda Houseago. Visit her Home Page at Richenda Houseago's Home Page. As well as weather links there are cloud images available.
Yet another good jumping off point for weather enthusiasts is Michael Kruk's weather site at http://members.tripod.com/~MichaelKruk/weather.html with a wide variety of information and links, especially under Severe Weather Information and Fun Weather Places. (In case you don’t know, Tripod.com lets you put up web sites for free. Just the place for enthusiasts to mention how wonderful gliding is.)
Carolyn Bierworth's site at http://www.eagle.ca/~matink/themes.html is another huge list worthy of a visit. It’s part of a large educational site she has established. It includes a link to weather for pilots, weather songs (strange people these met men!), cloud photo sites and many informative educational sites.
Our American friends might care to visit this US aviation site's weather links, www.dispatcher.org/brief/adfbrief.html, for a lot of interesting weather links. Or they could try the WeatherNet Links page, one of the orginal BIG weather sites.
Pretty pictures of clouds
Many gliding and aviation sites have a pretty cloud picture or two as their background. Ever wondered where they get them from? The following sites all have good quality cloud images available. In several cases, clicking on the small image they display links to a better quality larger image. Many are suitable for tiling to save download times. Several are also educational sites, explaining how clouds form or influence the weather.
The PSC Meteorology Program's Cloud Boutique discusses the various types of clouds and their characteristics and formation, with many good images available. This is a reasonable educational page as well.
Some good images can be found at www2010, while some of a slightly lower quality can be had at Colby College.
Richenda Houseago's Home Page mentioned under monster links above, also has cloud info and images.
Stormguy's cloud gallery is pretty good, as is CloudMan's. With names like these, you can tell they like cloud photograpy and it definately shows.
The WeatherGallery.com specialises in high quality weather photos of many types.
Have a look at these links as well, if you'd like to find some good cloud pictures for your desktop: -
www.scienceclass.com/dayscape/pages/main.htm
Gordo's Cloud Gallery, which has some excellent images
inspire.ospi.wednet.edu:8001/curric/weather/pricloud/
Finally, fancy a clouds based screen saver to brighten up your day? Then go to http://www.kloudscape.com/
| John Wright, 742 | johnpegase@blueyonder.co.uk |  |
