Topic: Weather websites list and analyse some useful websites

[sorandru]

Hi,

I found a new weather site www.weatherpage.com.au

Interactive forecast from 24hours till 10 days!

very nice!

[James]

I have some serious questions over that weatherpage website anyway -

"Accurate forecasts based on results of 15 worldwide weather resources" - I'd love to know what the 15 resources are and to use the word Accurate. Aren't GFS and EC the only models to go out past 7 days for Australia? And the word Accurate ..... well it may be accurate as of what a weather model is showing right now but will it be in 9 days time ... I highly doubt it.  Interesting to look at anyway.

[David Brodrick]

Maybe you won't mind if I give a plug for a weather website I have been working on for the past 6 months. We don't even claim to have accurate forecasts :-)

Oz Forecast
http://ozforecast.com.au/

I have a bunch of stuff I still need to add in and fix up. The highlight will be our own TOGA lightning network but we're still putting the hardware together for that. We do our own WRF model runs, but that's currently broken.

Regards,
  Dave

[Jimmy Deguara]

Well done - it looks quite nice! The colour code is good to the eye in the radar and it works well given one can place any town and it shows up the correct region like in Weatherzone.

Regards,

Jimmy Deguara

[Richary]

I agree. Very nice indeed. It knew where my suburb was, and gave me the right information.

Though I am wondering where it says closest radars and soundings, it doesn't mention Sydney. Just Newcastle, Canberra etc.

Cheers

Richard

[David Brodrick]

Thanks guys. It's been a lot of fun to develop. The composite RADAR images are only new. I made a vortex following composite RADAR subset as well, I'll send the link through when the next cyclone fires up, it looks pretty cool!

Richard, I've also noticed that the Sydney sounding doesn't show up. I've got no idea why, but it doesn't seem to appear on the University of Wyoming's website where I source the data from, but I'll double check to make sure it isn't a mistake that I've made.

Cheers,
  Dave

[Michael Bath]

The Sydney soundings are at different times (19z and 04z) to the others so it mucks up getting them off the Wyoming site. You'll see the same problem when trying to access them from Ben Quinn's site too.

http://soundings.bsch.au.com/index.html

[Mike]

I use Dave's Ozforecast site every day.  The radar animation is great and I can even locate my own area for a change to compare the radar with what I'm seeing outside, which is something that gives it a personal touch!

 What happened to the skew-t loops, David?  Can't seem to locate them anymore.  Also, when you do the listings for storms in Darwin what do you use to constitute possible severe storms as shown in the tables?

The good thing about this site is that it gives me just about all the info I need re winds, dew points etc, etc and i've found it quite useful when planning a chase when using all the other info online. Once the lightning software get's up and running it will be so cool!  Given the 8 day forecasts there also it gives an indication of severity likelihood if storms develop given the conditions.

Mike

[David Brodrick]

Cheers Mike!

The main nomads servers had a disk failure so I'm using a different server to get the GFS data at the moment. Unfortunately some of the fields in the GFS files are different, so my GFS skew-t's are temporarily offline. I'll fix that up shortly, but in the longer term the nomads servers are switching to 'operational' status this year and then they will have 24x7 reliability.

The storm forecasts currently just look at the (best) lifted index. It doesn't work very well for Darwin however as it says 'severe' for almost every day! I'm planning to make it smarter and look at the shear and turning environments rather than just the instability. Hopefully I'll have that sorted out soon.

Regards,
  Dave

[Richary]

That bsch site has some interesting information I hadn't seen before. Now to work out how to use it!!!

Interesting the precipitation forecast gives over 300mm for an area of SW Qld in the next 180 hours. That will be good for the downstream farmers and the Murray water flows if it actually happens.