Marc’s Musings Reality from Marc’s point of view!

With Hurricane Dennis about to make landfall I thought it would be appropriate to post a number of weather links that I like to use when planning my flights. Some of them have excellent facilities for tracking and projecting tropical storms and hurricanes.

Basic

• I rather like Yahoo!’s interface to the weather channel for both Marietta and Lawrenceville.

More Advanced
If you like weather charts and want to see satellite imagery and projection charts, the National Weather Service (NWS) is brilliant.

• This link to the NWS’ Aviation Weather center has much of the basic information you need for flight planning. Take a look at the satellite links to see big weather systems such as hurricanes, etc.
• There is really no rhyme or reason to the site and associated URLs, if you poke around long enough you can eventually find what you’re looking for. But for hurricanes and the like, go here (I clicked on “News” from the link above and then “National Weather Service” from the “Top Story” on that page). Anyway along the top you’ll find links to current major storms. Clicking on “Hurricane Dennis Graphics” (as of today) will give you some very useful images showing actual and projected paths for the hurricane.
• Finally here is a legend to help decipher all those symbols you see on the charts above.

Aviation Specific
All the links below have a bent toward aviation in particular:

• The AirNav site (here is KLZU - My Home Airport) is specific to each airport and you can get relatively recent ATIS (Automated Tower Information Service) or AWOS (Automated Weather Observation System) which is basically just airport local weather. The ATIS will offer some extra info such as runway in use, etc. but for this post, the weather’s the thing.

These links require either that you have a pilot’s license or that you are a member of AOPA.

• AOPA’s weather information is provided by Meteorlogix - so this is a nice perk of being a member
• I make use of DUATS for my overall flight planning

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Posted under Aviation