Pennine Software Weather Page
Welcome to Pennine Software's internal home page for weather.To keep download times more reasonable for cavers and walkers, all the stuff relating to Sea State now has its own page.
WARNING despite W3C dictats about persistent URLs, weather chart URLs seem to change nearly as often as the British weather. It also seems to be becoming common policy for weather sites to make it increasingly difficult for other sites to include their images in pages (such as this one). If links or images below don't work, it is always worth trying Westwind whose maintainer keeps track of a huge (and therefore confusing) amount of weather info and does a much better job than I have time for of keeping his links up to date. If I find a link broken, I always use Westwind to try to work out where the page has moved to.
What you'd see on the TV weather forecast:
| Europe cloud and pressure composite | 3 day Europe surface pressure animation |
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There's a (possibly more legible)
larger version of the +24
chart on the RNLI site. You can get bigger charts for Pressure, fronts and
significant weather using the UK Met. Office model up to five days out from the
USAF site:
NOTE links to this site have been down for a while - including
links from Westwind. It is not clear if this is a temporary problem or if the site
has died permanently...
| UKMO USAF | Today 00Z + ... | ||||||
| SLPressure, Fronts, Sig.Weather | 0.5d | 1.0d | 1.5d | 2.0d | 3.0d | 4.0d | 5.0d |
NOAA provide the UK Met. Office Bracknell charts big and printable, as TIFFs (open with ImageViewer or similar, browsers aren't good at TIFFs) - these are the same Bracknell charts that are used for the three day animation above, but much more legible:
| UKMO Bracknell (Noaa, TIFFs) | Today 00Z or newer + ... (Update 06Z) | |||||||
| SLPressure, Fronts, H500-H1000 | 0.0d | 1.0d | 1.5d | 2.0d | 2.5d | 3.0d | 4.0d | 5.0d |
And here is a page giving access to a variety of charts for Europe forecasting +12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84, 96, 108 and 120 hours ahead from the US Navy European MetOC. Each chart is a gif, of about 90-100k. The +48 hour surface pressure, 12 hr precipitation and winds chart is included below:
| Surface Pressure, 12 hour precipitation and surface winds, 0-120 hours | ||||||||||
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For longer forecasting, the most promising stuff seems to be charts for up to ten days from wetterzentrale - best accessed through westwind.
ECMWF High Resolution Limited Area Model charts from the KNMI (Dutch Met. Office) site
KNMI have made these a bit harder to get at, but the Swiss westwind server seems to provide a php script which puts in the relevant date to get the charts we want. These only work as links (because westwind must send a client-side redirect to the real page, and these don't work in image tags).
Unfortunately, I don't entirely see how that php script works (the links above seem OK before midday...) - I'll try to provide some javascript to get the relevant pages back inline soon. Try the full set of links to the KNMI HIRLAM charts. These forecasts are actually coming from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, whose site doesn't seem to give access to any useful end-user forecast products, which are supposed to be delivered by national met. offices. There is a more extensive range of HIRLAM charts on the Italian site, linked via westwind.
Latest IR pic, Europe
IR view shows temperature of cloud tops, whiter clouds colder than greyer. Coast lines and lat./long. shown in northern polar stereographic projection. Images dated 0000, 0600, 1200 and 1800 take about 90 minutes to be processed and put up on the web.
The Met. Office site says "Missing images: During the equinoxes the geostationary satellites pass through the earth's shadow. Because of this, the transponders of the satellite are switched off to conserve battery power, so some images will not be available." Recent experience (April 2003) suggests that the images normally shown here are missing from the Met. Office site too, though it seems to be a long time after the equinox and versions of the images (not as readable) are available on other sites. Try via Westwind. Its interesting that other geostationary satellites don't suffer this problem - when did you last hear about satellite TV being off for a month ?
Nottingham seems to have stopped putting up satellite imagery for general access. You can get imagery from Dundee, but you have to register (free) and supply a username and password everytime you want to look at an image, which makes it difficult to include their images in my page. Try directory, which should work once you have registered.
Perhaps the nearest I can get to a useful satellite pic is a link to the < a href="http://www.eumetsat.de/cgi-bin/imagery/listImages.pl?m=0,s=2,c=1,o=0,f=1,a=0,n=6,d=1,v=400,p=0"> Eumetsat site where you can see lots of pics, if you have enabled javascript. Unfortunately, there is no simple URL to include an image within this page. Latest D2 thermal ir image from Nottingham (hourly, c 5 mins after reception)
Latest E2 water vapour ir image from Nottingham (six hourly ?) Latest C2 visible image, NW quarter, from Nottingham (hourly, c 5 mins after reception - not useful when it's dark!) -->
Latest visible light image, Europe
Visible light view produced 1200 daily, up on web by c 12:30.
There seem to be periods when this image becomes unavailable (you just get an image from sometime in the past - which may be coming from a cache that is unable to obtain a current file). Try opening the image in its own window and choosing "refresh" a couple of times - if the image is really unavailable, you ought to get a meaningful error message.