Pennine Software Weather Page

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, although recently I have noticed a lot of the links there don't work, either.

What you'd see on the TV weather forecast:

Europe cloud and pressure composite	3 day Europe surface pressure animation

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

The NEMOC charts were among the best I'd found, and ran out to +120 hours, but the system has changed and now only rather grotty charts are available to the public. Currently the most useful ones I have seen are from the SKIRON site in Greece, but these only run to +72 hours:

 

Surface Pressure, 6 hour precipitation 0-72 hours	+6 hr	+ 12 hr	+ 18 hr	+ 24 hr	+30 hr	+ 36 hr	+ 42 hr	+ 48 hr	+ 54 hr	+ 60 hr	+ 66 hr	+ 72 hr
Surface Pressure, 2m air temp. 0-72 hours	+6 hr	+ 12 hr	+ 18 hr	+ 24 hr	+30 hr	+ 36 hr	+ 42 hr	+ 48 hr	+ 54 hr	+ 60 hr	+ 66 hr	+ 72 hr
Wind at 10m. 0-72 hours	+6 hr	+ 12 hr	+ 18 hr	+ 24 hr	+30 hr	+ 36 hr	+ 42 hr	+ 48 hr	+ 54 hr	+ 60 hr	+ 66 hr	+ 72 hr

For longer forecasting, the most promising stuff seems to be charts for up to 7½ days from wetterzentrale - best accessed through westwind.

• UK Shipping Forecast
• Inshore Waters Forecast
• Irish Coastal Forecast

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.