Having the Web at my fingertips saves me from making a lot of phone calls. If I want to know what time a movie is playing at the local multiplex, I don’t have to call the theater; I look up the show times on the Web. If I want the number of the nearest car rental place, I don’t have to call information; I look it up in the online yellow pages. And if I want to know whether to wear a tank top or a sweater to the park, I don’t call for the weather report as I did when I was a kid in Baltimore; I look it up on the Web.
Indeed, for all I know there is no longer a number you can call to hear the day’s weather report over the phone. And, trust me, if there were it would be totally superfluous, because today you can get all the weather information you ever knew existed, and then some, on the Web.
Americans are obsessed with the weather. The one time I ventured away from this country, to Italy, I found it almost impossible to find out even the temperature that day, even as the country was suffering through the worst heat wave it had experienced in years. Here in America, we have no such problem. Bank clocks flash the current temperature every 40 seconds or so, and newspapers show the day’s weather from the news racks. The Weather Channel is one of the most popular stations on television. And there’s a reason they save the weather report for the end of the local news.
So let’s take a little stroll about the Web where weather information — local forecasts, storm warnings, global warming information, earthquake reports, climate research, satellite maps, natural disaster reports, rare phenomena like heat bursts, you name it — is rampant.
A good place to start is the site of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This site has a weather question of the day, handy for school-aged users; advice about how to conduct yourself in the event of a hurricane; and a NASCAR driver showing you just how dangerous it is to drive your car through a flooded roadway. All of this is in addition to the usual forecasts and storm warnings.
The National Weather Service (a division of the NOAA) also has a nifty home page. The site lets you click on a color-coded relief map of the U.S. to get local weather forecasts for most large cities. It also includes links to various weather laboratories, such as the Climate Prediction Center and the National Hurricane Center.
Moving right along, we come to one of my favorites — the AccuWeather site. In addition to the latest weather headlines, this site has a radar map of the country that you can animate so that the green patches of precipitation move back and forth across the U.S., just like they do on your television weather forecast. If you prefer, you can also watch satellite images of clouds drifting across your state. At the AccuWeather site, you can also check out the day’s extreme-weather spots and maps of places where lightning has struck in the past 24 hours.
Another of my favorites is the Earth Alert section of the Discovery Channel site. The site shows a world map dotted with cute little icons you can roll over for a quick description of international weather phenomena. I learned today, for instance, that Italy’s Mt. Etna is spewing lava, and that six U.S. states are on fire. Not to mention the floods in China. Clicking on any of the icons brings up the full story of that phenomenon.
Lastly, and perhaps my most favorite, there is Bad Meteorology. Here, Alistair Fraser — a professor at Penn State University — debunks often repeated misconceptions about the weather. As it turns out, raindrops are in fact not shaped like tear drops, and sinks don’t actually drain counterclockwise in one hemisphere and clockwise in the other, as I’d always been taught.
Weather is certainly a fascinating topic, affecting the lives of every one on the planet, but it is by no means the only topic that lends itself to exploration on the Web. There is a lot of information to be found out there, from sites about space to gardening to literature to woodworking to art. In this age of e-commerce and online business models, of pornography and smut, the quantity and quality of weather sites on the Internet is reassuring: It reminds us that one thing the Web is really good for is learning. That, and lowering our collective phone bill.
Read more by Andrea Dudrow.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on June 5, 2000
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
