New weather locations on line

[Phil Herring]

For those of you who have submitted weather requests lately, the newest batch is now online.ph.

[Wynn Ferrel]

Phil,Have seen the Intellicast site? It is pretty cool. They have terrific wind forecast and graphics as well as a general SAILcast map. VERY informative. Seems like an improvment over what you are now doing. Is there a possible tie-in with them for your site?See www.intellicast.comWynn FerrelS/V Tranquility

[Phil Herring]

Yes, we've tried a number of forecasting sites, including the Weather Channel, which also has some very cool sailing stuff. Most of them would not even acknowledge our request, or, in the case of Intellicast, have no "products" that fit our needs. The reason we have wx4u.com is, they let us link directly to their "deep" pages, like the NOAA weather reports. Intellicast, and the other sites we tried, would only allow us to put a large national weather map (general weather, not marine) on our site, which would link to their home page or weahter index. which, we felt, was even worse. The service we are using provides excertps from the actual NOAA weather you hear on the radio. it doesn't cover laeks very well, but that's because areas w/o commercial traffic don't really get marine coverage. We'll continue to look for better services, but until the bigger, more sophisticated weather sites offer a more customized method of using their forecasts, we'll stick with what we have.

[Paul Akers]

Phil,This might be a good topic for discussion.I don't know how NOAA forecasts are in other regions, but in New England, they have to be verified with local radio and TV reports. Through lots of personal experience, it seems that NOAA is correct maybe 25% of the time. They usually give generalized forecasts. A perfect example was in 1991 when hurricane Bob struck the Northeast. NOAA was calling for cloudy skies and moderate weather. They never even mentioned the hurricane. Our cruising companions listened to local TV reports and found out that we were going to get hit. We had to make it home 35 miles. The hurricane struck 24 hours later. If we had stayed where we were, we would have been somewhere in Buzzard's Bay where the hurricane hit the hardest.