My Favourite Weather Forecasting Services

For years, the Bureau of Meteorology (or BOM) has been the place to go get your weather information… and no wonder as it is packed full of useful goodies and maps and charts and… all sorts of stuff that unfortunately often requires a degree in meteorology to interpret properly 🙂

Many other online services now available provide weather information which us “common” folk have a better chance of understanding…

Willy Weather

Willy Weather (a website and app) allows you to set your location to the nearest town (or any town for that matter), and provides a seven day forecast along with all sorts of temperature, wind, rain, rain radar, sun, tides, moon etc information for that locality… all on one relatively easy to use screen.

Just note however that the CURRENT figures provided for that locality are for the closest BOM recording station… which could be many kilometres away.

For example, my current location in the Upper Manning Valley (NSW) suggests that my “local” BOM station is actually in the Hunter Valley ??? But if I force the app to select Wingham which is 50km away, I get a slightly more accurate picture 🙂

Facebook Pages

If you spend any time on Facebook, you’ll find quite a few “localised” weather pages… Believe it or not, this is a fairly competitive industry, and these guys are very serious about what they do !!!

Because I spend a lot on time on the East Coast in Northern NSW and Southern Queensland, I spend most of my time watching:
1. Higgins Storm Chasing
2. South Brisbane Storms
3. Tamworth and Region Weather (my old stomping grounds), and
4. The Early Warning Network

There are certainly plenty of other guys doing the same type of reporting all over the country.

Follow them long enough, and you’ll work out that they use this next service quite a lot…

Stormcast / BSCH

Stormcast is now my “go-to” website for working out what the weather holds in store for me for the next week.

And once you work out how to use the Stormcast charts, you can amaze your friends with accurate temperature and rain predictions LOL

So far I’ve only been able to work out how to use two of the prediction charts they provide…

The first chart I worked out how to use is for predicted rainfall… useful when trying to organise people for a group camping weekend 🙂

This chart provides a 4 hourly spread every day, for the next seven days.

So… visit the Stormcast page.

Then click on the RAIN tab at the top left-hand side of the map… (see pic below).

Here you’ll see the prediction for Rain over the next week or so, which have been developed using the Global Forecast System (GFS) prediction model.

* Click on the DAY and HOUR you want to see on the left-hand side.
* Click on the STATE / REGION or CITY you want from the links ABOVE the map.

Next are the maximim predicted temperature charts…

And these have been copping a bashing from me in the past few weeks as I work out where I need to hide while the country is being scorched like a campfire marshmallow!

Again… visit the Stormcast page.

Now make sure you click on the “OCF Model” (Operational Consensus Forecast) and then zoom into your part of the state/country and select the days you are interested in (again, see pic below).

This chart provides an idea of the maximum predicted temperatures expected each day, for the next seven days.

The PURPLE areas ??? Well, they are DAMN HOT!!! See the scale/legend under the map? Anything RED or PURPLE is too hot for me LOL

I particularly like looking for those COOLER spots when the summer days are going to be boiling hot 🙂

IMPORTANT

It’s always important in times of major events (storms, floods etc) that might be affecting you, that you DO visit the BOM site regularly and stay in touch with their weather warnings page.

Check out THIS animation I have made which shows the predicted temps over the next week up to February 2nd…

via GIPHY