We’ve gathered a handful of essential weather related links to help you plan your next outing. Below are links to different services with explanations of usability and complexity of information. Add comments with your windcast / forecast links!
the Weather Underground
The Weather Underground is a full featured weather site that offers simple navigation, clear visuals and extensive forecast data. The benefit of Weather Underground is the use of “Personal Weather Stations,” data gathering spots run and maintained by individuals, not just airports and other large sites. This dramatically increases the precision of weather calculation for an ever-increasing number of places.
After you’ve entered a city or zip, click on the “Detail” link under each day and get easy to read, visual windcasts like the one pictured here.
Click on this wind map to visit Weather Underground’s animated windcast maps. Choose a state or region and you’ll get a list of cities, each with a current forecast. The highlight of this list, however, is the option to sort by category. So if you sort by Wind Speed, it will order them from weakest to strongest winds.
Basically, Weather Underground can supply with you with all the info you’ll need to plan a single outing or a whole week of flying.
AccuWeather
AccuWeather is another online weather site, providing basic information to the masses. Although you could probably get detailed info here a lot of it comes at the cost of a premium service. However, the one thing about Accuweather is its wind maps, which are simple to understand and allow for up to 10 days advanced windcast.
It’s not the most accurate, but it give you an idea of general wind speeds for regions and areas.
U.S. National Weather Service
The National Weather Service, as you may imagine, is the website and database of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. So if you’re looking for specific, or even basic information, you’ll find it here. In fact, most other sites cull their data from this resource.
The link above takes you to a regional map whereupon clicking a point brings you to a local forecast, for example Portland, OR. These inner forecasts are easier to read and offer simple weather data.
However, if you want to get to the real nitty-gritty you’ll want to check out the “Experimental Digital Forecast” page. This feature, apparently still experimental, allows you to zoom into a region, choose a point, set some variables and get a weather data in various formats. There are three basic formats, straight text, text in tables, and XML–which if unstyled is just a series of numbers and letters.
For example, choose Table, 3 days, 3 hour increments, and Delta Park from the dropdown list of locations. Hit Go and you’ll get something like below.
You can even choose a location from the map, which when processed will give you the location in Longitude/Latitude and an approximate distance from a selected spot.
The National Weather Service site is full of other data, so if you’ve got the time go hunting for more Windcasting information.
