WebJunction

Overview

In this category you will find additional resources on weather and climate that you can use to supplement the resources available at the NOAA and other government web sites. While some of these sources are not government sponsored web sites they are quite reputable and are freely accessible.

Additional Resources

Weather Underground

http://www.wunderground.com/

Originally started by a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, it has grown in the past 15 years to be one of the most popular weather web sites on the Internet. The web site is supported by a variety of advertisers which makes it somewhat difficult to navigate.

Some of the characteristics of this web site that make it so attractive are the real-time updates, its accurate reports, and extensive coverage of places, both U.S. and international. Users will find current weather forecasts and patterns, historical hurricane statistics, tropical storm outlooks, monthly hurricane summaries, and tropical weather discussions. Also available are aircraft reconnaissance reports, hurricane archive, and articles of interest.

Additional features of the web site include photos, a list of weather stations, ski conditions, and radar maps. Weather junkies will also enjoy Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog. Advanced features enable users to create very specialized reports and acquire specific weather details.

International data

Quite often we get requests for weather and climate conditions for our neighbors in the north and the south. This information is great not only for vacationers, but researchers as well. The following are the official government weather web sites for Canada and Mexico and contain a wealth of information for those countries.

Canada:  http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/canada_e.html

Mexico:  http://smn2.cna.gob.mx/SMN/PagsNavegacion/Default.aspx 

State data

While the NOAA web site covers weather and climate conditions for all states, sometimes your users will request more localized climate conditions such as smoke levels, avalanche conditions, river levels, snowmelt runoff, road conditions, flooding, tornadoes, and airport status. For such local and regional conditions, official state web sites will provide details not available elsewhere and not available easily. Be sure to bookmark the following web sites

Arizona:    http://www.lib.az.us/links/climate.cfm

Colorado:    http://dola.colorado.gov/dem/index.html

Nevada:    http://www.nv.gov/new_weather.htm

New Mexico:   http://www.ose.state.nm.us/water-info/ISC-H2O/climate.htm

                  http://weather.nmsu.edu/ClimateLinksTest/index.htm

Utah: http://www.utah.gov/keywordsearch/search.html

State sites in the midwest:

The State Climate Office (SCO) is the home of the state climatologist. State Climatologists are individuals who have been identified by a state entity as the state's climatologist and who are also recognized by the Director of the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the state climatologist of a particular state. More detailed information on the weather and climate of a particular state can be found at these sites:

Illinois:  http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/atmos/statecli/index.htm

Indiana: http://www.agry.purdue.edu/climate/

Iowa: http://www.agriculture.state.ia.us/climatology.htm

Kentucky: http://kyclim.wku.edu/

Michigan: http://climate.geo.msu.edu/index.html

Minnesota:  http://climate.umn.edu/

Missouri: http://www.missouri.edu/~moclimat/

Ohio: http://www.geography.ohio-state.edu/faculty/rogers/statclim.html

Wisconsin:  http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/

Collaboratives

Community Collaborative Rain Hail & Snow Network 

(Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada & Wyoming)

Western Regional Climate Center

(Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah & Wyoming)

Archived Weather and Climate Statistics

For those researchers who need archived data, the following web sites are very useful:

NOAA Radiosonde Database

Coverage includes 1994-2006. The Radiosonde Database is a merger of the Universal RAwinsonde OBservation program and the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The Global Change Mastery Directory is a database of databases and provides access to multiple other data sets. Coverage is variable depending on the data set you select.

Western Regional Climate Center--El Niño/La Niña

This web site is devoted almost exclusively to coverage of El Niño/La Niña weather data. Indispensable for those whose focus is El Niño/La Niña.

NOAA Publications

Data also available from the main NOAA web site. This is the old interface for those users who are more comfortable using it.