[NetNews: Recent news about additions and enhancements to Major Weather-Related Internet Sites, brought to you by CASI, the Central Atlantic Storm Investigators (http://www.weatherwatchers.org). Send your reports of recent changes or additions to the websites of *major* weather providers to netnews{at}weatherwatchers.org for consideration. We will not accept advertisements, only significant updates to major websites which affect the Internet community. This message is sent out first to CASI Members then later posted to appropriate Newsgroups.] Quite a bit going on this week across the Weather WWW. The big news first: 1.) AccuWeather gives out all local NEXRADs, Hurricane Center These people just won't slow down! AccuWeather http://www.accuweather.com/ relaunched their Personal AccuWeather service today. In doing so they now compete directly with Intellicast by doing something they hadn't before: giving out high quality Local NEXRAD Base Reflectivity radars. Unlike Intellicast who gives out a large number of the NEXRADs via city pages, AccuWeather gives access to all 141 US and 1 Puerto Rico radars, and has a map to click on stations as well as a station list. The map is very accurate for placement of the radar sites, it is clear that some care was taken to locate them correctly on the map. Some may surprise you - PIT and CHS for example are a long way from "Pittsburgh" and "Charleston" but crosschecking with a lat/lon coordinate, they are correct. Radars are delayed by 30 minutes. http://www.accuweather.com/weatherf/radarf_qx01 Besides this they have also taken the Username and Password away from their Personal AccuWeather Free service so now you don't have to signup or keep track of personal info, just go to http://www.accuweather.com and enter your zipcode. This brings up the Personal AccuWeather page with the Local Nexrad, Current Conditions, and links to a lot of other weather content - superior to what you may have experienced with their previous Free service "Get Weather." In addition, they have launched their Hurricane Center for free, which includes a meteorological discussion for Atlantic, Pacific, and Overall as well as current graphics for storms and educational modules. http://personal.accuweather.com/hurr98f/index_qx01 Best of all, all these things are now bookmark-able and linkable unlike the previous incantations of Personal AccuWeather Free. Like Intellicast, you will be unable to link to the Local NEXRAD images; they are made unlinkable so that you have to load the HTML page and see the ad. But hey, the equipment these companies use to show us these NEXRAD images probably isn't cheap. On Personal AccuWeather Free there are some links that will take you to ads for their Pay Service, which we have mentioned before, for $4.95 a month gives you 4 types of "real-time" local NEXRADs and a lot more. 2.) The other big new this week has already been covered here : American Weather Concepts has dropped their UNISYS feed and converted to Freese-Notis Weather Radar images for their Pay Service. The conversion is still taking place and many of their images were still down this afternoon. AWC's updates have gone from 10 to 6-10 minutes due to this but is still $8/month. Rumors are that AWC is trying to form partnerships with smaller companies to combat "The Big 3 (Accu, TWC, WSI)." http://www.weatherconcepts.com/ 3.) Got The Intellicast Blues What's up with Intellicast trading their white Radar Summary numbers and lines for light blue? I thought it was a temporary color table problem last week but it's still going on. Looks weird to me. Example: http://www.intellicast.com/weather/usa/radsum/ 4.) The Weather Channel Goes Cubic TWC introduced another playtoy this week, called "The Weather Cube." http://www.weather.com It's more "neato" than useful - definately wins this year's award for using Java where you should have used VRML ;) It is a cube which displays common TWC maps which you can click on to enlarge. The whole cube spins around via your mouse. Bad news: Requires an IBM PC with Pentium Pro suggested. 5.) WNI goes to Antarctica Why? Maybe just because they *could.* Yahoo Weather (WNI) added an Antactica section to their World Forecasts. Maps are South America (what?) but there are forecasts for 5 Antarctican locations. Unfortunately, forecasts for Vostok have been almost 40 degrees off... forecasts this week have been about -55/-65F, and Vostok's actual temps have run -80 to -100F (see synoptic obs below). ##### TIME T DP RH HI LO 89606 18z26 -89 -94 77 -89 *** 2605 *** 6HR**** 24H**** 0/8 1/8 89606 06z27 -92 -97 77 *** -92 2506 *** 6HR**** 24H**** 0/8 1/8 -- ============================================================== Jesse Ferrell - Meteorologist/Web Dev. - j{at}weatherwatchers.org Central Atlantic Storm Investigators - www.weatherwatchers.org "And here a twister comes... here comes the twister." --Talking Heads || ICQ No. 136832 || --------------------------------------------------------------------- ************************************************* Central Atlantic Storm Investigators Mailing-List To Post: casilist{at}weatherwatchers.org To Cancel: lists-admin{at}weatherwatchers.org Archive: /members/casilist *************************************************