Weather Web Sites Spawn Storm of Interest

After all was said and done, Hurricane Floyd probably sucked more people onto the Internet than it did palm trees and street signs into its swirling maw.

In the days preceding landfall, Web sites scrambled to post progress reports and up-to-the-hour satellite images as the tempest churned toward the East Coast. Virtual storm-chasers got a running countdown to a disaster that never lived up to its billing but still touched off the largest evacuation in U.S. history.

Weather is unpredictable that way, and that’s probably the reason it whips up as much fret and fascination as it does. If it hadn’t been for that fickle right turn off the coast of Florida, who knows the havoc Floyd could have wreaked.

It’s no surprise then that preoccupation with weather has found a home in cyberspace. The whims of nature certainly have more immediate impact on people’s lives than the stock market--that other uncontrollable force that has spawned an industry of Internet pundits and analysts all trying to forecast the future.

Everyone has a vested interest in knowing the chance a particular low-pressure system has of spoiling a backyard barbecue or, worse, paralyzing a whole region.

For their part, Internet advertisers seem convinced of weather’s allure. One weather site in particular, Intellicast (https://www.intellicast.com), has pages so laden with flashing, animated pitches, the content sometimes appears to be an afterthought.

Like all sites of its kind, Intellicast has current-condition reports and extended forecasts--complete with standard-issue weather graphics--for cities and hamlets around the world. As would be expected, satellite and Doppler radar images are also common fare.

Intellicast has even gone one step further to offer condition-specific forecast maps that show probable temperatures, winds and even the likelihood of thunder as far as a day and a half into the future. The maps go from easily decipherable--such as the temperature chart--to the more arcane. The wind map, for example, might be better left to a meteorologist.

Intellicast also attempts to educate the unschooled with its “Dr. Dewpoint” feature, which reviews the fundamental mechanics and terminology of weather and also provides a lengthy list of recent scientific articles.

Naturally, the television network that has become synonymous with fair and foul skies, the Weather Channel, operates one of the most high-profile Web sites on atmospheric caprice: https://www.weather.com.

Oddly, content on the site, as it appears on some monitors, is sandwiched into just two-thirds of available screen space, leaving a swath of white coursing down the right side and prompting users to wonder what went wrong in the design department.

The Weather Channel site, however, does have useful features for just about anyone who might be affected by weather. Outdoor enthusiasts, for instance, can find region-specific information on conditions impacting golfing, boating, hiking and other pursuits. Another feature for motorists enables users to click on interstate highway maps and pull up the weather status for specific stretches of the roadway.

For its part, the weather site operated by Lycos Inc., https://www.lycos.com, gives air travelers the same type of service with comprehensive listings of airports around the world and possible weather-related problems.

Perhaps the most authoritative weather site on the Web is the one operated by the U.S. National Weather Service: https://iwin.nws.noaa.gov. The site, which reportedly fields 4 million hits a day, posts copies of all weather advisories and reports issued by NWS monitoring stations across the country. The packaging of the information is no-frills. The advisories appear just as they are written: halting, choppy sentences in capital letters broken up by ellipses and asterisks and often containing obscure abbreviations.

But in a more user-friendly vein, the site enables viewers to survey color maps of the country as well as individual states and pinpoint NWS reports for specific towns and regions. And the reports provide a far-reaching array of information, including temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure readings for every hour within the last 24 hours.

But if Earth-bound weather isn’t enough, some sites offer reports from elsewhere in the solar system. “The Daily Martian Weather Report” at https://nova.stanford.edu/projects/mgs/dmwr.html doesn’t exactly live up to its name, but users can find condition reports for various locations on the red planet from as recently as June. The information comes from the Mars Global Surveyor probe and is delayed because of lengthy transmission times.

Meanwhile, “The Space Weather Bureau” at https://www.spaceweather.com can provide the curious with daily forecasts on such phenomena as solar flares, meteor showers and magnetic storms. Hurricane Floyd may have been the size of Texas, but who knows what could be coming at us the size of Earth?