Certainly for truly local, Thornton weather, ThorntonWeather.com is the place to go. However you sometimes want a bigger picture or details on the weather for a different location and for that, a newly revamped Weather Underground website is the place to go.
We here at ThorntonWeather.com are big fans of the Weather Underground. The site has always provided much greater depth and detail with more features than local media outlets and even more than the ‘big names’ like the Weather Channel.
Further, Weather Underground brings in the data from thousands of personal weather stations (PWS) like ThorntonWeather.com’s and uses those to provide local conditions to visitors – not airports miles away. In return, Weather Underground allows PWS owners to use their data freely, something which we do on ThorntonWeather.com and truly appreciate the reciprocity.
Where does ThorntonWeather.com use Weather Underground data?
We recently wrote about the newly redesigned Weather Underground site on Examiner.com and thought ThorntonWeather.com readers would like to learn more and add this resource to their bookmarks.
New site design and forecasting system highlight revamped Weather Underground
Few today would recognize the text based weather service from the University of Michigan that was launched as “um-weather.” From those humble beginnings, Weather Underground has grown to become the world’s second most popular weather website and today the company launched a new design with its own proprietary weather forecasting model.
The Weather Underground website, long a favorite for weather enthusiasts, features a number of unique features to cater to everyone from the layman to the professional. Other consumer weather websites gloss over the data behind the forecast and while Weather Underground keeps it simple if you want, the site also allows you to delve in much farther into the weather than any other site.
Searching for weather for a given location does give you conditions and forecasts based on the “official” stations for a given location like any other weather website. More importantly however, Weather Underground draws upon a network of more than 19,000 weather stations that feed data into the system, 8,500 of which are personal weather stations operated by weather enthusiasts and unique to Weather Underground.
This network of stations allows visitors a much better chance of getting real time conditions close to where they live rather than an airport or other station 20 miles away. This array of stations might be considered weather “crowdsourcing” to use an in vogue tech term but in the end it means truly local conditions no matter where in Colorado – or the globe – you may be.
Dr. Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground, said today that the most significant feature of the new site is “BestForecast.” This proprietary forecast system draws on statistics from the weather station database as well as various computer models and creates a unique forecast for the visitor’s exact location.
This differs from most other weather websites that simply repackage less specific forecasts from the National Weather Service. Masters said, “With this new technology in place we’re confident that our forecasts will prove to be the most reliable on the market.”
Further, Weather Underground won’t stop with generating the forecast. By comparing the generated forecast to the actual conditions recorded by area weather stations, the BestForecast model will continually be refined. “Thanks to our personal weather station network we have more data points to carry out this cross-verification method. We then use what we learn to enhance the accuracy of our predictions,” Masters explained.
Of course the redesign of Weather Underground contains a host of usability improvements that break down the site’s content into seven distinct sections. From local weather to maps and radar and even ski reports everything weather related is here.
Last but certainly not least, one aspect of the Weather Underground site that continues with the redesign is the unique community of users. The site is the only major weather website that allows its users to create and maintain their very own weather blog. Weather Underground also boasts a user-generated database of more than 1.25 million weather-related photos. These two longtime features add up to give Weather Underground a level of interactivity for users that other weather websites have yet to match.
You can check out the new Weather Underground website by visiting www.wunderground.com.
I hate the new site. Too hard to get to the hourly forecasts – most important in my area due to dangerous hills and freezing. Looking for another weather site.
Weather Underground ceased operations December 30, 2011. No further information available.
They are back up and running. A notice on their Facebook page said they were performing site maintenance.