Weather

My weather:

Growing up in a rural community, the weather was always a hot topic. If you needed hay for your horses and cows, or had to pay attention to crops, the weather was of vital importance. Although none of those factor directly into my life today, I still find the weather very interesting. Here are popular links I have collected:

Forecast Sites

In Approximate Order of what I check:

• MerrySky: A clean interface, an alternative to DarkSky. Based on the PirateWeather Open Source API
• NWS Weather Site: The National Weather Service’s primary site. Pretty basic layout, but gets the job done. I especially enjoy the “graph” view the lays out precipitation predictions on an hourly basis. Also there are a lot of really intereesting specific tools:
  • Extreme Winter Storm Severity Index: An automated way to rate winter weather severity.
• Michigan Storm Chasers and Michigan Storm Chasers Facebook
• WUnderground: A site I’ve always followed since the 90’s, when they provided a telnet service for getting weather info.
• OpenWeatherMap: Another interesting service that probably has the most open API other than the NWS…and OpenWeatherMap has a far cleaner API.
• Weatherstar: Emualation of the 90s era WeatherStar 4000 (think old-school Weather Channel display). Source

CLI Forecast Sites

• wttr.in: A great way to get the weather from the command line - or anywhere (such as this page) Also open source

Other Interesting Sites

• AirNow: Government site on air quality.
• Michigan MDOT Camera Site: Nice way to see current weather/road conditions.

Blogs

• JohnDee.com: A private meteorologist from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Unfortunately John Dee passed away on November 14, 2023
• Bill’s Blog: A blog from a local meteorologist from Grand Rapids.