The National Weather Service in Lake Charles has deemed this week as Severe Weather Awareness Week. Check out the NWS’s Sam Shamburger’s presentation on severe weather. In addition to NWS initiative I wanted to empower our viewers with additional tools to track our daily weather, like having your own Weather Lab at home or work! While there are great weather web pages available through the NWS, Storm Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center and many others. There are some great utilities or “mash-ups” that can make your Google Earth sing. (Make sure you have already downloaded Google Earth). As I said yesterday, you need a broadband internet connection, and put this on your fastest/newest computer…this works with many varieties of windows, but as always the fastest processor, best video board, and most ram wins. But generally any pc that is newer than 4-5 years will be able to handle the program.
A great place to start would be through the Metaltoad Media page that will get you state by state, and radar by radar information that will include local watches and warnings. It is probably wisest to go the individual radar page and just download the Lake Charles site only as to not bog down your Google Earth. Once downloaded check the files (which will be put in your temporary Google Earth folder) and expand the file boxes. From there you can get the latest radar data, including velocity, estimated precipitation, and local NWS warnings for Acadiana. When toggled on, the data will automatically update every 5 minutes, but you can configure each item to update sooner if you go to “properties” and set a higher refresh rate. I wouldn’t advise this however as the data is set to come in on an interval that the Weather Service sends them out, but for local warnings it should get you the data in a more timely fashion Tomorrow we’ll take you to some of the best weather satellite and offshore sites and other goodies for your Google Earth on our 6pm newscast.