Ever look for an alternative to the Weather Channel’s website to get your weather?  Check out NOAA’s National Weather Service at www.weather.gov.  This site provides a lot more detailed information than seems to be available at the Weather Channel’s website.  It’s a little harder to navigate, but once you get used to the site you are bound to find something useful.  To get started, if you are looking for local weather, enter your city and state or ZIP Code in the box on the upper left.

I’ll point out a few features that I like to use and let you explore to find what else is useful to you.

1)  Detailed Point Forecast – allows you to select your exact location on the map to get the most specific forecast for your area – much finer level of selection than just a city or ZIP code.

2) Hourly Weather Graph – this is a link in the lower right corner of the local forecast area in the “Additional Forecasts and Information” area.  This provides a nice line graph of a variety of weather forecast data that makes it easy to see for the next several days what the weather is going to do.  Items like temperature, sky cover, precipitation potential, etc. are listed.  You can customize this graph to show only those items you are interested in.  I find it really useful when I want to ride my bike to work – so I can quickly check the forecast through the day to find what the weather is going to be like.

3) National Digital Forecast Database – click on the map in the lower left corner.  This brings up a map of your local region with a variety of different forecast data options.  Use the options at the top to select the time range you want to explore and then just hover your mouse pointer over the weather data you are interested in and the map updates to reflect that data.  This allows you to quickly scan a visual image of the forecast for the region over a period of time and for different forecast types without waiting for a new webpage to load.

So when you are ready to explore weather in a different format – check out weather.gov!