Many of the weather websites that I use have URL's that are dynamically generated and only valid for a short time. I've tried to explain how I get to them but when people are web surfing don't have the attention span for that. They want the instant gratification of a live link. Basically I start with the Continental US map of watches and warnings. This gives me a broad picture of where the problems might blow in from in the next few hours. Currently we are under a Snow Alert so that's all I need to know about today. Cedar City is in a Red Flag Warning, high wind and low humidity, so there is fire danger in the desert there. Next I look at the 7 day forecast for Salt Lake City, it tells me that we will have cloud cover until at least next week. If things were looking good at this point (which they are not) I would look at the 4k Infrared animations for the western US. This tells me if there is an approaching cloud front. As it gets closer to sunset I look at 2k animations of Infrared and Water Vapor. On Astronomy Day this year, there was a large wet one marching across Nevada towards us in the afternoon. I made my decision not to go out based on that. As it happens the front stalled briefly at Wendover and gave us a few hours of clear, but I'm happy with the call I made. If we are in a stable and clear weather pattern, I then use the mesoscale map that I gave the link to (it's in the archives if you want it). It gives wind arrows with feathers on them for strength and a temperature and gust speed number. Roll your mouse over them and you get elevation, humidity and dew point and in some sites cloud cover. Click on a site and see a 2 day history of wind temperature and dew point. This is how I learned to stay out of dry lakebeds like Pit n pole. They are consistently 10 to 20 degrees colder than a higher elevation site just a few miles away. I also look at weather sounding information from the U of Wyoming. Weather soundings show you temperature and dew point in the vertical direction as well as precipitible water in the entire air column. Less than a centimeter is good, more than a centimeter is bad. Also you can read the inversion layer. This tells you when it is warmer in the mountains than the valley bottoms. You could go up to 7000 feet and be above most of the moisture in the atmosphere. Good stuff to know in the wintertime. My take on the Clear Sky Clock is that it is a good attempt but it falls short. The Transparency bar is really the precipitible water in the air column but doesn't tell you whether it's all bunched up in a cirrus layer or spread thin over the entire column. The weather sounding from U of W does tell you this. Also the CLC cloud cover bar doesn't even see the thin cirrus layers. Last Saturday's CLC for SPOC was rated as "clear" while anyone who was there knows better. Oh and I also often just stick my head out the door and just look up at the sky. I learned to do that from Guy. DT __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com