Here’s this week’s CBC Web column…
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The weather is perennially fascinating. We check the forecast first thing in the morning. We check the weather in cities we might be visiting on business or vacation. And northerners heading south for a bit of sun pay particular attention to the hurricane forecasts.
Once upon a time, the only source of weather information was your neighbour’s big toe that always acted up when it was about to rain. But these days, there’s more weather information than you can shake a rain stick at on…where else?…the World Wide Web.
I have no idea how many sites are devoted to the weather, but simply Googling “weather forecasts” turns up well over a million hits. I confess I didn’t explore them all.
In Canada, of course, there are two main sites for weather information: Environment Canada’s weather site, and The Weather Network. The main U.S. weather site is that of the National Weather Service.
Both Environment Canada and The Weather Network offer forecasts, of course…and since they’re not quite the same, you can pick which one you like better! (It’d be nice if we could just hold a vote on which forecast we preferred and that would be the weather we got, wouldn’t it?) What’s interesting about that is that Environment Canada provides most of the raw data for the Weather Network’s forecasts. Meteorology is not just a science, it’s an art!
Both sites offer much more than just forecasts, of course. You can view weather maps, satellite imagery and radar images. There are lightning maps and sea ice maps, air quality forecasts and hurricane information.
The Weather Network, being a television-centered service, also offers quite a bit of video: clips of what they broadcast, but also links to webcams around the country, so you can check out local conditions visually. CBC’s webcams looking out over Wascana Centre and downtown Saskatoon are both there, for example.
At The Weather Network, you can get the same kind of information for a number of international cities as you can for those in North America. When I checked, for example, it was 19 degrees (with blowing dust) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and the forecast high was 31.
Environment Canada provides a link to one of the best sources of international weather, the World Weather Information Service of the World Meteorological Society. They provide official conditions and forecasts for most of the world. Need to know Friday’s forecast for Samarkand, Uzbekistan? It comes direct from “The Centre of Hydrometeorological Service at Cabinet of Minister’s of Republic of Uzbekistan (UZHYDROMET) “ (I suspect machine translation was involved in turning that into English.)
The biggest purely Internet-based weather site is the Weather Underground. It actually predates the Web: back in 1991 Jeff Masters, a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Michigan, wrote a special computer interface that displayed real-time weather information around the world to Internet users. By 1992, it had become the most popular service on the Internet. It evolved with the Internet, and launched its website in 1995. It started out just covering U.S. cities, but now it covers the world. One of the most interesting things about it is that it includes data from personal weather stations individuals set up to upload information to the Weather Underground. There are dozens around Canada, including one in Regina.
Those who prefer to get their weather from the Old Farmer’s Almanac will find it online, too. But the Old Farmer doesn’t give away his famous long-range forecast for free: you’ll have to register and pay a small fee to gain access. Or, of course, buy the book (and, yes, there’s a digital edition).
You can get the same kind of local forecast from the Old Farmer’s Almanac as you get at The Weather Network or Environment Canada’s site, with the added twist that the Old Farmer’s Almanac lets you know what it predicted for the month, so you can compare.
The Almanac also offers weather history: you can enter any date and get the conditions for that date, back to 1946. Except, alas, it doesn’t have records for every site: North Dakota records seem to be as close as you can get for Regina, at least for the older records.
Environment Canada has us covered, though: its Past Weather records go back to 1953 for Regina. Fifty years ago on September 27, for example, it was mostly sunny, the high was 24.4, and the low was 5.6.
Lots of sites devote space to weather trivia and records. My favorite is the page maintained by “Dan, Dan the Weather Man,” a U.K. weather forecaster who’s travelled all over the world—even Antarctica–and spent a short time in Toronto working for The Weather Network. He’s got all sorts of weather-related stuff on his page, and among that stuff is an extensive collection of Canadian weather trivia, organized by month. There seems to be an entry for every day of the year.
The entry for September 27:
1965, Pearson Airport, Toronto’s coldest September night on record; lows dip to -3.9 C. 2002, the remnants of Tropical Storm Isidore brought some rain to eastern Canada after one of the driest summers on record in some parts here.
Lots of individual meteorologists have websites devoted to their passion—like Nick Walker, who works for the U.S.’s Weather Channel. His site is unique because it’s home to the only Musical Meteorology pages I ran across, songs with titles like “What Makes Rain?”, “Clud Cover,” “That’s the Way Winds Blow,” and “Tomorrow’s Weather Here Today,” and, of course, his signature tune, “Weather Dude.”
That old saying about how “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” was never truer than on the Web. A quick Technorati search turned up 3,185 blogs about weather.
You could, in fact, spend all day, every day, doing nothing but reading about the weather.
Of course, if you did, you’d never experience a glorious fall day in Saskatchewan. But at least you’d always know what it’s doing in Samarkand!
