Weather Sources on the Web

In my article "Weather Sources on the Web" published in the 40th issue of Freepint, I mentioned the
multi-sourced approach of complementarity towards completeness. This table allows the comparison of historic, current, and future weather conditions for some locations of interest. Every country has a national weather centre, or so-called, meteorological office. Not necessarily every such office will have a web site. Historical data is usually more difficult to come by, than current or forecasts. Current weather conditions on the web refer to the latest available - rarely real time continuous basis. Forecasts, on the other hand, are readily available for the day, next day, or day after. However, accuracy and reliability vary greatly. Finally, longer term forecasts, i.e. a week ahead or longer, are usually not available.

For travel planning, you would want to look at normal conditions (i.e. long term historical averages, usually 30 or 20 years) to gauge the likelihood of deviating widely from current and forecast temperatures/conditions.

The follow-up discussions at Freepint's bar (subscribers only forum) pointed out that I had forgotten to mention the most obvious: The Weather Channel.

The responses to my article varied greatly. Weather is very important in the agriculture sector, travel industry, and a necessary piece of information for any location-based web site, e.g. Camarthen, Wales.

If we have enough historical data, then we should be able to ascertain what we can expect at certain times in the year in a given location. Historical weather statistics of various locations can be found at Reading University's site.

In general, every news web site has (or should have) a weather section. For a list of newspaper links, see the PUBLIC HOLIDAYS section of analyticalQ.

The BBC has interesting articles on weather at http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/

USA Today also has interesting educational articles on weather at http://www.usatoday.com/weather/

Hayfever season again - before going out in Great Britain, check BBC's pollen forecast.

Conversion Utilities

Time	by the second, minute, ..., century
Temperature	Ryan Kyle's temperature converter at U.Wash. College of Chemistry at Berkeley Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin
Precipitation	Length
Windspeed	USA Today's Wind Calculations Windspeeds: knots, MPH, mps, kph Danish windpower matrix Speed or Velocity Conversion
Relative Humidity Dewpoint	From wet bulb temperature Relative Humidity Equations
Pressure	Millibars and Inches of Mercury USA Today's Understanding Pressure
All Sorts	Weather Calculators & Algorithms El Paso Weather Services list Length, Area, Volume, Mass, Temperature

Weather Index

reflecting all facets of weather's effect on energy demand or energy price:

Heat Index and Wind Chill how uncomfortably hot or cold?
CNG Energy Index
Degree Days more widely used in the US than in Europe
Goldman Sachs Commodity Index
JP Morgan's Commodity Index
Bill Gile's Weather Index mainly UK

Weather Derivatives
Risk Management

To protect against weather fluctuations or an undesirable out-turn, take out an insurance, but how much should it cost? The valuation of weather derivatives depends highly on past history.

"Betting on the Weather" (pdf file - 303 kB, html page) by Anne Ku, July 2001

analyticalQ links