Weather Stations
CalTopo now has a source for NOAA weather stations – some are in standard airport and urban locations, but a number of others are in quasi-backcountry locations useful for trip planning. Note that the data is screen-scraped off of a web page rather than coming through a documented web service, so it may be less reliable than the SNOTel and water gauge layers.
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available as a data overlay checkbox |
Similar to the other data layers, at broad zoom levels only station locations are displayed, not station data. Zooming in, stations with winds greater than 10mph are rendered with arrows showing the wind direction, while stations with light wind or no wind data are shown as black circles. Mousing over a station brings up a tooltip with the last observation time:
As with SNOTel and stream gauges, clicking on a station brings up additional details and a link to the station’s official observation pages. The official pages contain additional information I’m not sourcing, like solar radiation, fuel moisture and cloud ceiling.
The details dialog also has links to government-sourced diagrams showing typical monthly daytime and nighttime wind patterns.
Between weather stations, SNOTel and stream gauges, CalTopo now provides hourly data from over 12,000 remote sensors nationwide! As usual, please report any issues.