Great Weather Site

Hey Gang
I just wanted to turn you onto something I found out about recently... many of you may already know of it. While in Patagonia you tend to watch the weather like its a possible second coming. We followed lots of sites. This one uses NOAA GFS modeling, which is what pretty much everything is based off of, but the way it is presented is a lot more useful to the climbers. Anyway, take a look... they no doubt have a mountain near your local crag in their data base.

mountain-forecast.com/peaks…

Thanks for sharing-Looks like a great site. Easy to navigate with frequent updates.

I found this site to be hilariously inaccurate in the cordillera blanca. Taking regular local wx obs and looking at trend worked way better. but it's pretty good for areas with better telemetry.

Sam Lightner, Jr. wrote:Hey Gang I just wanted to turn you onto something I found out about recently... many of you may already know of it. While in Patagonia you tend to watch the weather like its a possible second coming. We followed lots of sites. This one uses NOAA GFS modeling, which is what pretty much everything is based off of, but the way it is presented is a lot more useful to the climbers. Anyway, take a look... they no doubt have a mountain near your local crag in their data base. mountain-forecast.com/peaks…

Wow, that is really cool. I like that they immediately give you multiple elevation forecasts. You can do this on NOAA's website, but you have to do it manually. Thanks Sam.

Just FYI though, NOAA forecasts are not based solely off of the GFS model, rather NOAA makes their forecasts using a blended product which consists of the GFS, the NAM (North American Model; also from NCEP/NOAA), and the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium Range Forecasting) model. On any given day, NOAA forecasters take into consideration ensembles of runs from each of the models and then weight their confidence in each respective model based upon known model deficiencies and/or consistency with other models (i.e. outliers, if there are any, are given less weight when making their predictions.) You can usually figure out which models are getting it right on any given day by reading the NOAA forecast discussions where they usually give you insight into why the forecast is what it is and whether they have good confidence in the forecast or not. You can find the forecast discussions by first entering a location for a forecast. When the forecast screen comes up, scroll down to the section titled "Additional Forecasts and Information" and click on forecast discussion.

In general here in the US, it is often best to use multiple forecast offices to get a better idea of what is going on. That way you get the opinion of multiple forecasters. For example, when I want to find out about the weather in the Sierra, I usually read the forecast discussions for some combination of the Sacramento NOAA office, the Reno office, and the Hanford office (southern Sierra). To figure out which forecast office is responsible for any given forecast, look for the office name at the top of the page (generally right above where it says "Point Forecast: .....) For e.g., for Sacramento, it will say "NWS Sacramento, CA".

If you want to see the actual forecast model runs to make your own judgement, consider looking here:

aos.wisc.edu/weather/wx_mod…

Click on a grid and time (in UTC) and then select the surface loop for precipitation information on the subsequent page.

Was that overkill? Probably.
Cheers.

I've found that twisterdata.com has the best user interface for looking at the GFS and NAM. For the lower 48 anyway...

Anyone have a good site to see the GFS for Alaska?

Dylan Cousins wrote:I've found that twisterdata.com has the best user interface for looking at the GFS and NAM. For the lower 48 anyway... Anyone have a good site to see the GFS for Alaska?

For Alaska, you may want to check out U. of Alaska-Fairbanks local run of NOAA's WRF model. This is a regional model (as opposed to global forecast models such as the NAM or GFS). You can check their precip. etc. loops out here:

knik.iarc.uaf.edu/AtmGroup/…

The UA-F also runs an experimental version of WRF called the HRRR model (also from NOAA). You can check results here:

weather.arsc.edu/Operationa…

Both of those webpages are running the regional models with Alaska specific domains.

wunderground.com is another helpful site

I use noaa.gov and then read the forcast discussion to see what is really going on.