It’s so rare to have anything useful come out of the US government lately that we were almost shocked to find an intricate new tool available from the friendly folks at NOAA. Called NowCOAST, it’s a forecasting tool that has similar capabilities to the tools that NOAA forecasters have on their own computers, and is a huge upgrade to the dated and crappy forecast functionality that’s been anchoring the NWS for years.
NOAA says that “nowCOAST provides situational awareness on present and future environmental conditions for coastal and marine users by integrating data and information from across NOAA, other federal agencies and regional ocean and weather observing systems. For example, users can assess present conditions by creating maps of the latest in-situ weather/marine weather observations, weather radar reflectivity mosaics, cloud images from satellites, surface wind and sea-surface temperature analyses, and precipitation amounts for the last few hours. In terms of future conditions, users can obtain maps of critical weather and marine weather advisories, watches, and warnings, weather forecasts, tropical cyclone track and intensity forecasts, and forecast guidance of water levels, temperature, salinity, and currents from oceanographic forecast models.”
There’s more details on what the NowCOAST is about here, and after just a few minutes of playing around with it, we encourage you to do the same. It’s powerful, very rich with information, and looks quite good. Thanks to SA’er “Estar” for the heads up; bounce ideas off him and the rest of the meteo-obesessed Anarchists in the thread.
