On-Line
Weather Resources
for the PSAP
by Dave Larton
| Dave Larton is a dispatcher with the City of Gilroy, California. He is on the training staff of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, Telecommunications Branch, and the webmaster for several public safety web sites. He can be reached at larton@garlic.com |
| Illustrations: (select thumbnail to view detail image) |
 El Niño in the flesh: this satellite infrared image of the Pacific Ocean highlights the band of warm seawater commonly called El Niõ. JPL / NASA |
 This infrared composite of the West Coast was taken by the GOES 9 satellite. Areas of highest precipitation are highlighted in red and purple (darkest areas). Access to images such as this via the Internet allows emergency communication centers, EOCs, and the like to prepare their response to storm-related disasters. NWS |
There's an old joke that says you can determine exactly what the weather will be by sticking your hand out the window. If it gets warm, it's sunny. If it gets wet, it's rainy. Unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn't always fully cooperate with her inhabitants, and we frequently find ourselves in need for accurate, up-to-date and easy to access weather information.
Agency liability has shown the need to know and prepare for sudden weather changes. If a sudden snowstorm hits an area that isn't used to digging out, emergency services will become quickly affected. Emergency Operations Centers frequently have a television showing weather warnings, but most emergency services officials need more information than can be supplied by the eleven o'clock news.
Enter the Internet! By performing a simple search for the word `weather' in the Yahoo! search engine (http://search.yahoo.com), we were able to locate more than 3100 entries in 222 categories. Where can you go, and what can you find?
The National Weather Service Home Page (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, can take you to one of 48 Regional Weather Centers, giving NOAA weather radio frequencies, technical NWS hydrometeorological modeling documentation, The Global Telecommunication System & the NWS Gateway, World Meteorological Organization standards, and NWS software available for download. Click on the link marked `Current Weather,' and you are directed to some of NWS's most interesting weather-related data and products. Because of contract restrictions, the site does not include Doppler radar.
Personal AccuWeather (at http://personal.accuweather.com) includes current Doppler information, plus all official watches and warnings in text format, as well as national and regional maps that show the specific counties that are affected.
Images from several satellites are available to download. Visible satellite images give a good orbital view of the entire planet, but are available only where the sun happens to be shining. Other views, closer to those found on the evening news, are composite radar images called NEXRAD; still others provide infrared photography. Most images have been taken in the last 1-3 hours. Printed copies of these images can give an emergency manager a truly `birds-eye' of the current weather situation.
Local television stations have also taken an increasing role in providing current weather information via the Internet. The Weather Channel's Home Page (http://www.weather.com/twc/homepage.twc) has up-to the minute weather information, travel advisories and health and allergy bulletins, and California television station KSBW provides local coverage of the Monterey Bay area (http://www.ksbw.com) with several meteorological links for weather forecasts and satellite imagery .
Cable News Network Weather (http://www2.cnn.com/WEATHER/index.html) supplies a four-day forecast for over 6,100 cites worldwide. Many universities also have local Internet weather servers. One of the most extensive comes from the University of Utah (http://www.met.utah.edu/links.html) with linked sites to weather stations associated with universities all over the world. WeatherNet (http://cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet/) is a non-profit service sponsored by The Weather Underground at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In addition to weather forecasts worldwide, WeatherNet has links to nearly three hundred weather sites the most comprehensive weather index on the Internet.
Commercial enterprises, such as Intellicast (http://www.intellicast.com) and AccuWeather (http://www.accuweather.com/web/welcome.htm) use a combination of free products and a membership subscription area, where current weather is supplied for a monthly fee.
Many states provide local weather conditions online, such as the California Data Exchange Center (http://cdec.water.ca.gov/), sponsored by the State of California's Department of Water Resources. CDEC supplies close to real-time information on rivers, streams and reservoirs throughout the state, along with graphs that show the potential flood hazard of larger reporting sites.
Having accurate weather in the center isn't difficult, and can give emergency managers useful documentation during a weather related incident. Take the challenge of putting your Center on the Information Superhighway!
