Weather is one of the most significant and unpredictable variables that regularly affect our day-to-day operations. Whether it's a severe storm, tornado, flood or hurricane - having the necessary tools to help predict, prepare or respond can make a big difference to public safety.
Recently while visiting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website as I have often done, I came across a new and experimental mobile product: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutwap.shtml. This provides hurricane prediction information on mobile phones and other wireless devices that are Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled. Now you can easily view valuable information on your cellular phone, PDA, etc.
While this is an incredible new feature for public safety, the NOAA website with its various elements is the best weather-related websites on the Internet.
The ability to use weather websites to access interactive satellite/radar to track and predict future weather events allows public safety agencies to prepare for what may be forthcoming has improved greatly over the past decade. Combined with the Internet, this information is much more readily available to agencies at little or no cost.
Additional Features Worth Noting
NOAA RSS Feeds - RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is an XML-based document format for supplying or syndicating news and other timely information. It provides headlines, URLs (links) to the source document and a brief description of the information in an easy to understand and use format. RSS based "news readers" and "news aggregators" allow the display of RSS headlines on desktop and laptop computers, as well as mobile devices enabled to view RSS feeds.
RSS Feeds include: Weather Service National Hurricane Center Press Releases NOAA.gov stories NOAA Magazine NOAA Podcasts - Short reports on NOAA science and research. Among the 2006 podcasts, there are references to the hurricane season predictions, study of undersea volcanoes, etc. NOAA Storms and Hazards Portal National Maps River flooding Radar and Loops Air Quality Forecasts Graphical Forecasts Warnings and Forecasts Climate - highs and lows for the past 24 hours Aviation Forecasts Marine Forecasts National Hurricane Center Preparedness Discussions Probability Maps Archived Storms Warnings and 3 & 5 Day Cones Archived Storms Tsunami Site Fire Weather Forecasts and maps In summary, the NOAA website packs a mean punch bringing information from simple daily forecasts to animated satellite/radar loops, Fire Weather products, National Hurricane Center and so much more. The highlights that I have listed in this article only scratch the surface of the content on the NOAA website. If you haven't visited the NOAA website lately, you don't know what you are missing! Related: The official NOAA website: www.noaa.gov
