Until just recently my main source for weather information has been Intellicast because their national map was clickable for a regional map centered on Nashville and then another more detailed map of even more local radar imagery. The latest version is now a choice between Columbus, GA, or Bowling Green, KY. They appear to have changed almost every aspect of the site within the past week or so, since I used the features I just described as recently as April.
Do you use another source for a quick read on weather that may be affecting you in a matter of hours? Have you found a website more reliable than Intellicast?
I have links to all the local TV stations’ weather pages, and they’re usually most reliable when things are right on top of us, but I like to get a good view of the whole country at least when I log on the computer and whenever I get a sense that things may be picking up intensity weatherwise.
When storms are approaching I prefer the online tracking until the storm is within a few miles away, at which point I power down and turn on the radio. Using the TV channels for weather updates, unless they’re serious enough for local channels to interrupt programming for radar coverage and commentary, is either too much of a hassle or too spread out in time. The Weather Channel’s “Local on the 8’s” is okay, but who wants to wait 8 minutes?
I used to have The Weather Bug. Then, when I had the computer services to clean out Spy/AdWare & put on blockers for it, it came back with The Weather Bug removed and I figured it was a magnet for that junk & never put it back on.
Then for a while, I’d just go to my Yahoo personal settings which had local weather, eventually taking you to The Weather Channel’s page for details.
Just recently, I put on The Weather Channel Desktop. Got local & national maps
& forecasts like that. Now, I have the free basic edition. I figure the premium one won’t give me anything I can’t find by clicking to TWC’s site.
Amusingly, I’ll also keep TWC on TV for long stretches of time but part of that is
because of the WeatherBabes (Kristina Abernathy- yeah!)
The National Weather Service has actual meteorologists who live in the area they are forecasting for, with all the best data. If something is happening that you need to know about, they will issue a “short term forecast” or a watch or warning.
The only exception to this is if you live in a big city, a tv station might have some super-duper doppler system that can give radar results almost to street level detail. But that’s only the radar, the forecasts are bult on data from the NWS.
This would be my suggestion as well: I usually start off by going to www.weather.gov which will let me see the US at a glance, then I click on my region so I can narrow it down to my general area, then I plunk in my zip code to get the precise forecast. In my region the forecast page doesn’t auto-refresh, although they were testing a new layout that would a week or so ago, so I have to remember to refresh it occasionally.
Another option if you use Firefox would be to get the ForecastFox extension: it uses Accuweather for its information, and you can set it up to show all kinds of weather information in the bottom bar of your browser window. I have it so I can roll over the ‘radar’ icon and it’ll pop up a small image of the current radar for my general region: it doesn’t show the local radar though. It’s interesting to compare and contrast the Accuweather forecast to the National Weather Service one.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast the Accuweather forecast to the National Weather Service one.