National Weather Service , Boston (Or Taunton): A Couple Of Changes Of Interest

by Peter J. Wihtol

There has been one change of note for the National Weather Service, Taunton Office.

This is in the reassignment of the office's floor space for its large, central room. There are now two, equal-sized sections, they are for:

  1. those doing forecasts for southern/central New England. CT, RI, MA and Southernmost NH and VT.
  2. those doing rivers, lakes and hydrological predictions and observations. This group is either very busy or like the May Tag repairman, not at all busy. So I assume that they borrow from the other meteorologists in the building during the spring run-offs and the rainy seasons. In the last couple of years flooding in New England seems to have been a much greater problem.

One potentially helpful change of note for their website.

When you go to the NWS, Boston Office's website at http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/box/ Then look at the lower right hand side of the image on the page you will see "Experimental Forecast Images".
Click on image.

You will now be on a new page with Graphic Forecasts and these are broken down into 12 different categories of weather data. This data is shown on a map of southern New England. The data is color coded so that you can quickly scan the map for major differences in temperature, wind speed and direction, cloud cover, probability of precipitation, etc. Also there is numerical data given for major cities and for areas off of our coastline. Without clicking the mouse you can just run the cursor/arrow down the right hand side of the table on the left and get the data for 8 AM, 11 AM, 2 PM and 5 PM for the current day. There is a bit more to using this table and this section. Not too many people visiting this website are using this feature. If you are very much "into" the weather, then play with this new feature a while to get the hang of it and it will quickly give you access to a LOT more weather data and info very quickly and easily.