# Tornados Touching Down but not according to NYC weather sites **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 9, 2012, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146 "2012-09-09T00:19:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![cynyc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@cynyc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cynyc)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146/1 "2012-09-09T00:19:36Z")
What is THE place to find the **true** real time weather? Because I can’t find real time advisories via [weather.gov](http://weather.gov) or local news stations even with their reporting the touchdowns here. Meanwhile, my aforementioned searches are declaring possibilty of rain or thunderstorms with a temp of 66 or 86 degrees depending on where you look. ---
**Author:** ![Ionizer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/5daacb/32.png) [@Ionizer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ionizer)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146/2 "2012-09-09T01:04:45Z")
Not sure of your location, but I have found [URL=“[http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/www.wunderground.com/](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/www.wunderground.com/)”][weatherunderground.com](http://weatherunderground.com) to be great - watching various radars ‘live’ as tornadic storms come and go, plus a number of folks have personal weather-stations online (and often webcams as well) linked through that site across country so you can see firsthand what its like there, etc. LOTS of various live info sources, too. Might be what you seek 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![cynyc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@cynyc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cynyc)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146/3 "2012-09-09T01:20:11Z")
Thanks Ionizer. Meanwhile free art, clothes, antiques, couture, food, coins, medications, paper towels, etc. available throughout the tri-state area, Hudson and East Rivers, and the Atlantic. Oh and one Walker coonhound. LOL! ---
**Author:** ![Fubaya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c2a13f/32.png) [@Fubaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fubaya)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146/4 "2012-09-09T05:07:39Z")
You can get alerts from [alerts.weather.gov](http://alerts.weather.gov/). [Spotter Network](http://www.spotternetwork.org/google.php) puts storm reports on a map as they are reported. I’ve never accessed their date through their site during severe weather, but it should look something like [this](http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/4947/screenshot2012042820335.png), except with red dots instead of the hail graphics. You can see what’s being reported nearby and maybe where it’s headed. In this case, the storm to the lower right had been heading ESE and leaving a flurry of hail reports in it’s wake, so if you lived in front of it, you’d know what to expect. ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146/5 "2012-09-09T15:48:05Z")
I noticed this too. The weather report was like “30% chance of rain” when it fact it was raining so hard that it was like standing under a waterfall. [this is me yelling at the weather report like a crazy person] _There’s a 100% chance it’s fucking raining, dipshit._ I think the problem is that the weather was extremely localized, and the weather reports don’t think that way. For example, it was pouring rain on the south side of the LIE, and not raining on the north side. If the weather sensors are on the north side, they’re going to report light drizzle for all of northern Queens. (FYI, there was definitely a tornado warning for Kings & Queens counties, I saw it at about 11am yesterday.) That’s why the wundermap\* is so great. It’s real time, so you can see _exactly_ what the weather’s doing where. You can even see where the weather stations are, which sometimes explains conflicting or seemingly incomplete reports. \*a feature available on weather underground ---
**Author:** ![Michael63129](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3da27b/32.png) [@Michael63129](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Michael63129)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tornados-touching-down-but-not-according-to-nyc-weather-sites/634146/6 "2012-09-09T21:15:35Z")
> [@Hello\_Again](#): > > I think the problem is that the weather was extremely localized, and the weather reports don’t think that way. For example, it was pouring rain on the south side of the LIE, and not raining on the north side. If the weather sensors are on the north side, they’re going to report light drizzle for all of northern Queens. (FYI, there was definitely a tornado warning for Kings & Queens counties, I saw it at about 11am yesterday.) That’s exactly what they mean by a “30% chance of rain” - there is a 30% probability of rain falling somewhere within a given area (don’t know what the size is, but bigger than local and smaller than, say, a state)\*. There may also be a time element as well, such as a 30% chance of rain in a given hour during some time period such as 6 hours. As for what your local news reports for current weather, as you guessed, they report what the official NWS site, located at a major airport nearby (or not so near), is reporting. Even on Weather Underground, if you pick a personal weather station, it will still use the closest NWS reporting station for weather conditions (that is, “Partly Cloudy”, “Rain”, etc), regardless of what is happening locally. \*The Storm Prediction Center does state what their probabilities apply to, which is a 25 mile radius around a point for outlooks and a certain number of events in a watch (which means that even if they had a 100% probability of tornadoes, whether for an outlook or watch, the chances of actually getting one right where you are is still very low).