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Use Weather Underground Mobile then and vote w/your "feet".

IIRC one of the guys from WU has a hiptop (T-mobile sidekick) and even went so far as to create a rocking WU client for it (which I use daily).

I've had a Treo 600 for a year and half, and have built a library of PDA friendly sites. Most of the big sites offer an alternative view through either a mobile. prefix on the domain or a /pda suffix to the main site.
Here are my most used sites from my phone:
http://www.mapquest.com/pda/maps.adp
http://wap.espn.com/
http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/
http://mobile.wunderground.com/

Weather Underground is nice enough to display them all. That Unknown one worries me... (Are they reserving that one for comet strikes or what?)

Weather Underground isn't bad. And their HTML isn't hard to parse for my MS Agent talking page reader.

I've been using this lately.

I'm a weather nut and find this site to be an excellent national and international source. It incorporates major weather stations with personal weather stations to get some good unique results. The site is no relation to the 60s extremist group of the same name....

Not to sound like spam, but:

The Weather Channel has never had a useful web site. It has always been an epitome of anything which can be annoying, insipid, and featureless, consisting of little but regurgitated and labotomized government weather data and the occasional and blatant attempt to extort money from users. (At one time, they wanted paid for the singular effort of delivering storm alerts to my pager. By e-mail. Absurd.)

Back In The Day, before the rest of the world had heard much about this whole InterWeb thing, the University of Michigan started giving away weather information online. It seemed to grew in the altruistic sort of way that many things seemed to back then, steadily aquiring new features and formats for no apparant reason except that it was possible to do so.

That started 15 years ago.

Today, following the general trend, the efforts are commercialized (read: the staff needed to eat and pay rent), but quite clearly live on at The Weather Underground.

Sure, there's ads. But there's a wealth of good information, a feeling of completeness, and a general lack of bullshit and dumbness which is so sorely lacking with things like weather.com. A subscription to toss the ads and enable a couple of different features is a miniscule $5/year, which I've been happily paying for the last several years.

The information there is continuously improving. For example, they've been putting a lot of effort into their detailed radar presentations over the past year, which has really made a difference in seeing what's about to go on outside.

I like Google and the effort they put into user interfaces, simplicity, and completeness (except for when they most recently fucked up groups.google.com), but given the efforts of wunderground, I really don't care if Google ever gets into the weather business.

[ObDisclaimer: I didn't attend UMich, I don't even think I know anyone who has, and I definately have no interest in boosting wunderground traffic except, perhaps, to help people stay informed.]

As an aside, that is why your pitiful country is falling by the wayside, an also ran, as Asia and Europe move to the future, those with their heads in the sand get left behind.

Great link. There's another excellent article on the page, called The Skeptics vs. the Ozone Hole which is very interesting as they detailed the various techniques used by the industry and media to refute Rowland and Molina's 1974 theory about the ozone layer, apparently these same techniques are used to refute the science behind global warming. Some great excerts from the court documents, including some current figures such as Tom Delay and his thoughts on science and peer-reviewed papers.

I'm not going to tout this page from the Weather Underground as the last word on the subject, but there is clearly much to understand on this issue. I think the most interesting part of this page is the graph of the historical temperatures taken from the Greenland ice cap.

There is much sound data and research in the field of climate study that isn't completely understood, while there is a lot of political hyperbole as well. I'm trying to learn as much about it as a layman can while avoiding the political agendas.

FYI, the bulk of SS payments go to middle class people, not to poor people "freezing in the streets". And if you know someone freezing in the steets because of poverty, you should at least have the decency to buy them a one-way bus ticket (senior discount!) to Florida (currently 64F in Miami).

Doesn't matter who you get it from, all weather data on the internet (except for the BBC) for anywhere in the world ultimately comes from one of two sources: the NOAA NWP output and the NWS.

Dude! That's awesome! Just another reason why I love The Weather Underground! I looked high and low for a simple weather page with a radar image that I could display on my Treo 600, and I found it.

While some people find the picture pretty funny, it scares me that there are probably a huge portion who are ignorant enough to actually believe the damn thing.

Charleys' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200403.asp

Frances' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200406.asp

Ivans' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200409.asp

The most obvious screw-ups to me were that Charley did not pass over Putnam County. Frances went out over the gulf on its trip north, it did not stay directly over land. And Ivan clipped the edge of Florida, it did not run over the center of the panhandle.

If you believe that I'm just too worried about this, then you have much more faith in the intelligence and skepticism of people than I do.

As for more storms coming, it did seem unusual that Florida hadn't been seriously hit for awhile and now gets plowed by four hurricanes. Either way, would be a good time for a dome home. :)

While some people find the picture pretty funny, it scares me that there are probably a huge portion who are ignorant enough to actually believe the damn thing.

Charleys' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200403.asp

Frances' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200406.asp

Ivans' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200409.asp

The most obvious screw-ups to me were that Charley did not pass over Putnam County. Frances went out over the gulf on its trip north, it did not stay directly over land. And Ivan clipped the edge of Florida, it did not run over the center of the panhandle.

If you believe that I'm just too worried about this, then you have much more faith in the intelligence and skepticism of people than I do.

As for more storms coming, it did seem unusual that Florida hadn't been seriously hit for awhile and now gets plowed by four hurricanes. Either way, would be a good time for a dome home. :)

While some people find the picture pretty funny, it scares me that there are probably a huge portion who are ignorant enough to actually believe the damn thing.

Charleys' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200403.asp

Frances' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200406.asp

Ivans' actual path:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200409.asp

The most obvious screw-ups to me were that Charley did not pass over Putnam County. Frances went out over the gulf on its trip north, it did not stay directly over land. And Ivan clipped the edge of Florida, it did not run over the center of the panhandle.

If you believe that I'm just too worried about this, then you have much more faith in the intelligence and skepticism of people than I do.

As for more storms coming, it did seem unusual that Florida hadn't been seriously hit for awhile and now gets plowed by four hurricanes. Either way, would be a good time for a dome home. :)

That does sound very convincing when you first read it, because the author is an excellent politician. But you should beware of people who use strawman arguments (the young man at the panel discussion) and unfounded ad hominem accusations (accusing the government of being infected by irrational environmentalists who want to destroy industry) in support of their case.

Anyway, here's a generic rebuttal to the ozone naysayers.

Any scientific issue, no matter how rooted in facts it is, always has naysayers. Even the round earth theory had considerable opposition. For someone to dispute accepted scientific theory requires extraordinary evidence, and frankly this james p. hogan doesn't provide much in the way of actual evidence.

Oh, and in general, paying attention to whether a text contains logical fallacies is very helpful too in weeding out truth from falsehood.

As a resident of Florida (who's so far been pretty lucky with respect to the hurricanes), I've taken a keen interest in these models. The best place I've found to see them is at Weather Underground. Each listed storm has a "Computer Models" link at the end. See

Ivan
Jeanne.

Since the pages auto-refresh, I've just been leaving them up in a tab in Mozilla and checking them every once and a while. Though the models aren't always accurate and tend to change a lot, they kind of give you a feel for where the storm is probably going to go.

As a resident of Florida (who's so far been pretty lucky with respect to the hurricanes), I've taken a keen interest in these models. The best place I've found to see them is at Weather Underground. Each listed storm has a "Computer Models" link at the end. See

Ivan
Jeanne.

Since the pages auto-refresh, I've just been leaving them up in a tab in Mozilla and checking them every once and a while. Though the models aren't always accurate and tend to change a lot, they kind of give you a feel for where the storm is probably going to go.

As a resident of Florida (who's so far been pretty lucky with respect to the hurricanes), I've taken a keen interest in these models. The best place I've found to see them is at Weather Underground. Each listed storm has a "Computer Models" link at the end. See

Ivan
Jeanne.

Since the pages auto-refresh, I've just been leaving them up in a tab in Mozilla and checking them every once and a while. Though the models aren't always accurate and tend to change a lot, they kind of give you a feel for where the storm is probably going to go.

So the space shuttles survived Frances, huh? Good. But now, another hurricane looks to be barrelling down on them. Hurricane Ivan looks like it might be making an appearance in Florida next weekend. Shoot, at this rate, one hurricane per week, the shuttles may have a dozen or so hurricanes by the time hurricane season is over. If they can survive all of that, I'll be really impressed.

Kristiansand, not Kristansand. Never heard the Tricky song?
I met a Christian in Kristiansand

I always thought it was Christiansted, part of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. Tricky refers to "German Jamaicans" in another song, so I thought this lyric was referring to somewhere Caribbean.

But the name of the song is Christiansands, its lyrics say that also... So it must mean somewhere else.

There's already something similar to this. Weather Underground collects and displays data from personal weather stations. You can also access historical data from each location. Take a look at this page for an example. All they would have to do is provide a web service to report the data. If enough data is provided across the country, you could develop a distributed computing application to build weather models based on that data to forecast. But even today you have current conditions. Sure there will be pockets where stations don't exist, but as word spreads I bet they get filled. Lots of people with an interest in the weather and an always-on internet connection would be willing to buy a simple weather reporting station.

Oh, they aren't limited to the US either. Here's the list of stations in Germany for example.

There's already something similar to this. Weather Underground collects and displays data from personal weather stations. You can also access historical data from each location. Take a look at this page for an example. All they would have to do is provide a web service to report the data. If enough data is provided across the country, you could develop a distributed computing application to build weather models based on that data to forecast. But even today you have current conditions. Sure there will be pockets where stations don't exist, but as word spreads I bet they get filled. Lots of people with an interest in the weather and an always-on internet connection would be willing to buy a simple weather reporting station.

Oh, they aren't limited to the US either. Here's the list of stations in Germany for example.

There's already something similar to this. Weather Underground collects and displays data from personal weather stations. You can also access historical data from each location. Take a look at this page for an example. All they would have to do is provide a web service to report the data. If enough data is provided across the country, you could develop a distributed computing application to build weather models based on that data to forecast. But even today you have current conditions. Sure there will be pockets where stations don't exist, but as word spreads I bet they get filled. Lots of people with an interest in the weather and an always-on internet connection would be willing to buy a simple weather reporting station.

Oh, they aren't limited to the US either. Here's the list of stations in Germany for example.

There's already something similar to this. Weather Underground collects and displays data from personal weather stations. You can also access historical data from each location. Take a look at this page for an example. All they would have to do is provide a web service to report the data. If enough data is provided across the country, you could develop a distributed computing application to build weather models based on that data to forecast. But even today you have current conditions. Sure there will be pockets where stations don't exist, but as word spreads I bet they get filled. Lots of people with an interest in the weather and an always-on internet connection would be willing to buy a simple weather reporting station.

Oh, they aren't limited to the US either. Here's the list of stations in Germany for example.

Not that it is in any way a replacement for a government service, but The Weather Undergound of Hong Kong, and presumably affiliated groups, do have their own weather stations, though most of their data is from government observatories. But I think witout weather satellite photos, no one can conme anywhere near current state-of-the-art.

The spacing of the cracks, and their amplitude can give you an idea of the storm's strength. It works best during daylight hours because the noise is going to be more local in nature, and not skywave propogation. It's best to get a AM only pocket radio, not the AM/FM jobs.

And obviously, websites like Weather Underground have regional doppler radar maps which give you a visual of approaching storms.

Weather Underground is your friend.

The meltdown didn't turn the dead zone into one big glowing mass. It just created fallout: radioactive dust. Elena mostly avoids dangerous levels of radiation by avoiding dust. The roads she loves to scream down are relatively safe, because those smooth asphalt surfaces only accumulate dust between rain storms. But once off the roads, keep an eye on your dosimeter!

That actually used to be an issue in the U.S. Before they banned surface testing, fallout would appear downwind from the blast sites. At first, the radiation levels were dismissed as too low to be hazardous. But living things have a way of accumulating fallout. Cow's milk started to show worrysome levels, and women experienced high incidences of breast cancer.

I do hope Elena packs in her food and drink!

1. I first found out about the storm on Weather Underground.
2. Dvorak Source
3. CNN's 1st page on it. 4. CNN's follow-up page on it.

*. Hats off to the person that beat me to a first post. ;)

Though there are some places (like Ireland, I've heard tell) where simply predicting rain every day will be correct 80% of the time. There is nothing special about predicting rain, or any other given weather, in a place with strong statistical trends, eg your example, such as predicting rain in Prince Rupert (B.C.), or say snowfall in Phoenix. The whole point about developing this field is being able to predict the unusual and severe weather, weather that might cost lives, livestock, money, danger, whatever. The rest is just gravy, IMHO.

I've begun using their site over weather.com because the radars on The Weather Channel's site are not updated as often as Weather Underground's, and their site seems to be completely built around advertising, making it hard to find severe weather information and damage reports.

One last thing I like about Weather Underground is its speed. Radars load quickly, my favorites are stored easily, and (at least for subscribers) the layout is impeccable, utilizing a Google-like whitespace rather than cramming sensory overload everywhere.

Kudos to the team at Weather Underground!

I've begun using their site over weather.com because the radars on The Weather Channel's site are not updated as often as Weather Underground's, and their site seems to be completely built around advertising, making it hard to find severe weather information and damage reports.

One last thing I like about Weather Underground is its speed. Radars load quickly, my favorites are stored easily, and (at least for subscribers) the layout is impeccable, utilizing a Google-like whitespace rather than cramming sensory overload everywhere.

Kudos to the team at Weather Underground!

I've begun using their site over weather.com because the radars on The Weather Channel's site are not updated as often as Weather Underground's, and their site seems to be completely built around advertising, making it hard to find severe weather information and damage reports.

One last thing I like about Weather Underground is its speed. Radars load quickly, my favorites are stored easily, and (at least for subscribers) the layout is impeccable, utilizing a Google-like whitespace rather than cramming sensory overload everywhere.

Kudos to the team at Weather Underground!

1. One Wire Weather station from AAG.
   
2. Excellent free software to run it.
   
3. gnuplot to plot the results.
   
4. Post the information to The Weather Underground
   

Granted, it's not true forecasting, but you can easily add your data to aggregate with other users at Weather Underground and pull radar data from just about anywhere.

Me? I just like to know what's happening NOW, but it's also pretty handy to know what the temp is in your home "server room".

Tying all this historical data back into longer range forecasts would be fun. I've found TV forecasting to be pretty stale and inaccurate. How many of them have real meteorological degrees anyway?

This is already done, to some extent, and the data is available on wunderground.com.

At last all the data is there. Someone ingenious can write an app to gather all that data and make some real-time weather maps ... if they haven't already.

I would hope weather stations use digital thermometers now-a-days and automatically sample hourly or even more often readings into a database someplace.

I cant imagine where else data for graphs like this come from.

Check out the weather stats for Salt Lake City, UT (51" of snow a year). Many other large cities in the above mentioned states many not get that kind of snowfall, but still regularly have below freezing temperatures throughout winter (especially at night).

Well, There's always a chance someone on Slashdot doesn't know this, but... Global Warming / Cooling is junk science. The proponents have blocked appropriate measures of earth's temperatures, which involve measuring the ocean's aggregate temperature, and have done so for about a decade now. The measurement would have involved a solitary underwater explosion, and the sound wave would determine the ocean's temperature (although salinity has an effect, it is far from a trivial science). This would be a tremendous mass of ocean water.
The "Save the whales" crowd resurfaced decrying the untold damage to aquatic life by doing this, which is ridiculous compared to doing nothing to find out what is happening to our planet.
Air temperature measurements are a waste of time, especially in urban areas, which have an elevated measure of heat because of the asphalt roofs, roads, etc. Measuring the ice caps is also silly, because their size changes seasonally, like with weather cycles. Everyone remembers the Halloween blizzard in Minnesota. And the 65 degree day in late December 15 years later. The only useful measurement would be of a volume of water (not a tiny pocket of air) the size of the ocean, at the equator. But that's being blocked bye environmental activists; they must have something to hide; what's a few deaf gray whales if it will save the planet?
Did you bother to mention that the various "greenhouse gasses" are mere precursors to tropospheric ozone, which is the hazardous smog that is discussed at the Weather Underground ? All of the sudden, ozone is bad and good.
I read a statistic once that in order to be entirely solar with our power, we would cover the earth 11% over with the dumb cells. Considering the nasty chemicals involved in the manufacture of solar cells, and that solar cells are not simply recycled, and fail in a decade or so (fragile materials), I can't imagine why any earth-first crowd would want yet another major source of toxic waste.
I have long thought that the only solar cells of any use on our planet (since the stuff in space is pretty handy, I'll admit) are the green ones in my lawn and garden. They produce oxygen, which every living animal needs. If you live in a newly developed neighborhood (like in suburban USA), the best thing you can do for your environment is plant plenty of trees on your lawn. Sure, it means raking, but in my neighborhood, I have 100+ year-old oak trees, and they are positively enchanting. They keep the sun off my lawn so I don't have to water, and they keep the sun off my roof (remember, these are mature oak trees) which reduces my AC costs. McDonalds passes out seedling trees on Earth Day, so it really doesn't cost you anything. Sure, it'd make more sense if they passed them out on Arbor Day, but no one remembers when that is, despite it being the more venerable day of commemoration by a good century or more.

Go see the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

A high-ranking White House official with a predisposition for overreacting and fascist rulemaking has blamed the ready availability of instructions for snow-guns on the internet, and has asked that so-called weathermen stop presenting contradictory explanations for these terrorist incidents. The same official also insisted that anyone that discounts his theory is practicing poor science and harming the US's ability to combat terrorism wherever he sees it.

Factions such as the Weather Underground and the Internet Storm Center are high on his list of targeted terrorist groups.

Running diverse software on the roots is probably a Good Thing, but security through obscurity isn't

Man this is such a false meme, where did it get started? Obscurity by itself is questionable security, but as a component of a multi-layered security strategy it's perfectly reasonable.

• Security by obscurity is your world-readable /etc/passwd file, with the password data either hashed (obscured) or moved to the shadow file (also obscured). (And if your shadow password file isn't world readable, that's just more obscurity.)

• Security by obscurity is the fact that most people don't have the names & addresses of the personnel running the US military's nuclear weapons systems so that these people can't be blackmailed. Maybe these people can be trusted not to betray their country under torture and such, but keeping their identities non-public -- an obscurity measure -- is important too.

• Security by obscurity is Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" (*cough* Greenbrier Resort, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia)

• Security by obscurity is restricting access to your company's co-location facility, so that untrusted people can't get physical access to your equipment.

In short, in a broad sense, "security by obscurity" is a lot of good ideas, when you think about it. Any of these ideas can be an Achilles heel, but the solution there is not to cut off the heel altogether, but to wear sensible shoes when going out in the wilderness :)

To get back to the original topic, obscurity is a perfectly good tactic for the people running these DNS servers as part of their overall strategy for protecting the system. It's perfectly reasonable for certain aspects of their systems, processes, etc to be kept on a need to know basis. Sure, there is a benefit to keeping software source open as a security measure, though the benefit of doing that is debatable (and no, I'm not going to be the one to debate it -- I agree that it's generally a good idea but can understand some of the objections). But in this case, where the software is a black box to the outside world, and it's explicitly *not* meant for general DNS use (it's meant for authoritative servers only!) I don't see any particular harm in keeping their doors locked down pretty well.

Not that they're doing that in the first place. As another reply noted, you yourself write that both the betas & release will be available under a BSD style license :-)

But moreover, your objections are I think misplaced -- as are most of the people that blindly parrot the "obscurity is bad" meme. Think about what you're saying -- it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

POE Nexrad indicates debris in the air starting between Rusk and
Nacogdoches TX, then extending from Cherokee, Nacogdoches, San Augustine
and Sabine counties in Texas, into Vernon parish in Louisiana, ending near
Leesville, LA.

Also see Shuttle debris on Shreveport Nexrad

The real use of banner and popup ads on most sites is as a grating annoyance to encourage people to buy subscriptions so they can turn off the fscking ads.

It worked on me for Weather Underground, but they're cool and only $5/year, so I don't mind.

Must be lightning protection - check the weather there

Also get a load of the parts left over in a pile in the foreground of the picture... If you had that many parts left over after building a computer, not only would it not run, but you'd probably smoke something.

Birdhouse.
Weather station especially a type fastened to a pole

At the moment I'm having fun dreaming up ways to mount a plastic "awning" over my deck in a way which allows the awning to tilt and rotate -- well, maybe tilting is enough if the feedhorn rotates to always be vertical to the satellite's "vertical".
TV, CB, or other radio antenna (but might reflect satellite signals and cause interference -- at least it's cheap to try one).
The best disguise for a satellite dish? Disguise it as a satellite dish. Mount one of the allowed small dishes on the top of a post. The C-band feedhorn could be mounted underneath, or you could build a plastic duplicate of a small satellite dish, so the feedhorn in front of it is actually receiving through the small dish.

Tilting could be done with motors on four corner posts, lifting and lowering in various combinations -- remember that the distances betwen the top of the posts will change, so the solid awning has to be fastened with loose chains or sliding rails (with hinges or trailer hitches on each corner).

It's a japan-only model for exactly that reason. It'll be a long wait until it's available in
Ottawa