Ride between the raindrops: Precipitation forecast animation from UW

[Scott Kocher]

A friend recently pointed me to this fantastic outing planning tool: it's a 3-day precipitation forecast animation map for OR and WA from the weather scientists at the University of Washington:

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ove...d2_x_pcp1+///1

All else equal I prefer to ride when it's not raining, and this tool has been a remarkable help. The UW weather site has lots of other content. For cyclists this one far outshines "regular" forecasts.

Cheers,
Scott

[jeff]

Quite cool. It could stand a more explicative interface, and a more logical color scale, but one gets the general idea.

thanks for sharing, Scott!

[AJ08]

Just wanted to bump this up. Also, any opinions on the most accurate precipitation forecasts among online weather sites? For the most recent rain we had, weather.gov was the only one that had the timing spot on. All the others were hours off.

[q`Tzal]

Considering that all the that the local weather hacks do is reference the deep wonky data sets provided by NOAA I feel that there is a better chance of accuracy from the source; anything that a local astrologer meteorologist adds is as accurate as random chance or an ouija board.

All that said: unless you are committed, and possibly commitable, to teaching yourself all the terminology there is little chance that you will be able to accurately decipher the scientific level maps and data sets for even what is currently happening let alone predictive models.

I settled on pulling up the PDX Base Reflectivity radar loop and watch it every few hours when there is a weather pattern moving through; this familiarizes you with the way precip bearing clouds drop their payload. When combined with some basic knowledge about how weather patterns are affected by terrain, and temperature, humidity and wind speed you will find that you get better results than the local weather face.

[Alan]

I like http://www.wunderground.com/ - it has loads of maps, charts, statistics, astronomy and almanac facts. Satellite and radar maps (etc) are all NOAA data, of course, but they also have very local reporting from private weather station volunteers.

[K'Tesh]

Now this is a tool we all can use...

I'm sticking this post for our future use.