Everyone talks about the weather, but who puts it online?

By: Andrew Kleske - North County Times | Monday, June 13, 2005 9:04 PM PDT ∞

As hurricane season begins to drench the Gulf States and late spring thunderstorms rattle windows in the Northeast, some of us who grew up in places that have actual weather can get a bit home sick.

Not that we'd complain, of course. But it's hard to get too excited about a weather report that says clear and sunny for six straight months.

Luckily, to the Web we can go to live vicariously though the springtime weather of others.

If it's just a weather report one desires, there is no shortage of commercial sites that want to be your first choice for forecasting.

The Weather Channel's online component grabbed the best Web address at www.weather.com and binds its content to its cable news network.

Provider Accuweather at www.accuweather.com is a popular choice and features a virtual talking cartoon weather forecaster who is bearable to watch for perhaps 10 seconds.

Other commercial sites worth dropping by include Intellicast at www.intellicast.com, the Canadian Weather Network at www.theweathernetwork.com, and the somewhat inappropriately named Weather Underground at www.wunderground.com.

The Find Local Weather site at www.findlocalweather.com is a winner for its promise of serving up no pop-up ads.

If you'd rather see your tax dollars at work in weather forecasting, several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sites are worth checking.

The National Weather Service features everything from soup to nuts at www.nws.noaa.gov. The Storm Prediction Center at www.spc.noaa.gov has a great storm tracking tool and the NOAA Satellite and Information Service at www.goes.noaa.gov offers up great satellite imagery from its Geostationary Satellite Server. The National Climatic Data Center at http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov bills itself as the world's largest archive of climate data.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has its fancy devices in the game as well, with a wonderful collection of Earth imagery and information at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov.

If your taste for weather is more to the international flavor, there are sites that feature world views of weather patterns, often in a number of languages.

The World Weather Information Service site, hosted by the National Meteorological & Hydrological Services at www.worldweather.org, features reports for every country from Argentina to Venezuela, and we assume Zambia and Zimbabwe forecasts are in the works.

At Weather.org there is a nice world satellite map and an extensive list of World Meteorological Centers, and yes they do in fact already have Zimbabwe. Educators might enjoy the Royal Meteorological Society's MetLinkInternational Weather Project at www.metlink.org or the Australian Bureau of Meteorology at www.bom.gov.au.

The educational community also has many great weather web sites. UC San Diego, hosts its Climate Research Division at http://meteora.ucsd.edu and Scripps Institution of Oceanography's deep site at http://sio.ucsd.edu.

Other great university sites include the University of Wisconsin-Madison at www.meteor.wisc.edu, and the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu.

Andrew Kleske is the online editor for the North County Times. E-mail him at kleske@nctimes.com.