SEATTLE WEATHER

The US government, commercial services and the University of Washington among other provide many types of weather reporting. Sites not listed here may add themselves to our directory. See Weather in the Services section.

Visible light Except for color, this camera sees what your eyes would see, from a platform in space.

Infrared Differences in heat in the atmosphere, sea and land provide a view of atmospheric temperature contrasts that cannot be seen by the unaided eye.

Water vapor The density of atmospheric water vapor is used to predict precipitation and to observe cloud movement.

The US National Weather Service (NWS) is part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). Visit their sites for current information and additional satellite views and raw current weather data. The geostationary satellite page (http://www.goes.noaa.gov/) has lots more images from other angles plus time-lapse MPEG movies you can download.

That's the good news. The bad news is that NOAA apparently has a crack team of specialists whose sole job is constantly to change web addresses to keep us off balance (conspiracy theorists take note). If one of these links has expired, they've done it again. Tired of it? A list of your congressional representatives can be found here. (You might also be kind enough to let us know, too, after you send them a scathing denunciation.)

FEMA often has event-related weather information on their site.

(We tried putting a nice graphical link here to take you directly to the correct page at FEMA, but like many government agencies, FEMA appears to have people whose job it is to move their URLs and graphics around, seemingly at random. We take this to be a make work project, which is reasonable since the US has so few emergencies and the world so few disasters with which we could help. On the bright site, those people are not out mugging citizens on the streets of DC or their home towns.)

WSDOT operates low power radio stations at many mountain passes. These are typically at AM 530 kilocycles. They also broadcast traffic information and construction schedules.