Difficult to impossible travel across wide swaths of the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Difficult to impossible travel across wide swaths of the U.S.

weather.gov

84 pointsAnimats57 comments

Big thumbs up to NOAA's weather page. I've used it for years. The hour by hour weather report has the exact detail one needs before venturing out. I dont leave home without opening this bookmark.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.0891&lon=-8...

(needs to be set to your ZIP)

I switched from spammy weather apps and other sites to just using the NOAA years ago! The maps are basic but show me what I need as well!

My tax dollars at work! I’m very pleased.

Thanks for the 'needs to be set to your ZIP'. I looked at it and was like: This ain't accurate at all!

Many weather apps actually use data from the NOAA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/25/weather-i...

For those using DuckDuckGo, the bang !noaa <ZIP_CODE> will give you your local forecast.

I've got a set of scripts that scrape that to a text-friendly page, though NOAA also has an API I should probably look at to replace those.

Scripts FWIW: <https://pastebin.com/e82TkqEY>

I guess this headline is probably not hyperbole. The weekend before last I was backpacking with some friends in the sierras. We had six additional inches of snowfall, which wouldn't have been so bad but we also had wind gusts up to 45 MPH (according to weather reports, all we could estimate was "fucking intense"). But when not moving it was fine -- its easy to block the wind when you stop traveling and can shovel windbreaks.

Then last week end I was skiing in a T shirt, and some of the kids were skiing shirtless.

Now we're back to wild windstorms and precipitation this week.

I’m listening to the ice storm out my window in Ontario. It’s a nasty one!

It’s also wild that last week it was +14C and on Monday it was above freezing and 100% of the snow on my street was gone. February is typically incredibly cold and am used to there being a ridiculous amount of accumulated snow. But we got a reset.

That reset has one silver lining: spring flooding is likely to be unlikely.

Ditto in the area of New York sharing a border with Ontario :)

What are the odds of a snow day tomorrow?

4 and 6 year old insist it’s guaranteed, and as the only two family members currently in school, I have to defer to their expertise on the matter.

Several GTHA school boards have already announced closures:

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/school-bus-cancellations-in-effec...

crosses fingers for Woodstock

The guys in Waterloo are saying it’s especially nasty. I have a feeling we’ll all be home tomorrow.

National Weather Service current warning:

Difficult to Impossible Travel across Wide Swaths of the U.S.

Powerful storms that stretch from coast to coast will bring widespread areas of snow and blowing snow to low elevations in the West Coast and to the Great Lakes. Blizzard to near-blizzard conditions can be expected. Strong winds across the Southwest will keep fire weather threats critical in the South Plains. Thunderstorms, some severe, may produce localized flash flooding in the Midwest.[1]

[1] (bad capture by archive.is. NWS changes the content at that URL and archive.is shows an old one from last month.)

Record highs predicted for tomorrow on the East Coast.

Unless you're way up in the corner, where we're getting 6-9 inches of snow plus some sleet on top. We'll be in the mid-20's and falling to near 0 Friday night.

Tomorrow’s forecast for Northern Virginia: High of 80°F/27°C

Today was a high of 54°F/12°C

Unusual for late February, based on my 22 years living in the Mid-Atlantic.

That's Baltimore weather for you.

There's been no snow in Baltimore and surrounding area all winter. Been a weird winter as at least we'll see some snow

Fuck you Baltimore!

Currently snowing north of Boston

Can't both be true?

I'm not even color blind and the color legend is horribly unreadable. I wish they had used numbers instead.

No kidding. How many shades of purple are they going to use...

to do what? the colors represent different weather phenomenon, not the temperature. i quickly counted at least 16 different colors present on the map.

> to do what?

To make it possible to use the key at the bottom reliably.

For example, off the coast of California, there are two shades of purple. I'm pretty confident the darker one means Gale Warning. But what is the lighter one? Is it the light purple for Small Craft Advisory? Or the other light purple for Brisk Wind Advisory? Or the other light purple for Hazardous Seas Warning?

It's the same color so it means all three are in effect for those zones.

Oh, you're right! In Chrome developer tools, they're all #D8BFD8.

I assumed they were subtle differences because elsewhere there are colors with subtle differences: Flood Warning is #00FF00, and Flood Advisory is #00FF7F.

To state the obvious, it should be usable without needing developer tools.

Or at least had mouse-over to see what a given polygon means. Sure, there are 40 things happening, but I can't tell all 40 colors apart!

Pink and Purple mean BAD. There is no good Pink or Purple weather

It's actually snowing in (parts of) the Bay Area. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpkpxDCaEAUKbIc?format=jpg&name=...

Radar data at 7:40pm shows flurries over the East Bay and Santa Cruz hills.

For once, I would be better off in Vancouver rather than SF.

Vaguely concerning that page says "Round 1", heh.

SF Chronicle has a collection of photos:

<https://www.sfchronicle.com/weather/article/photos-show-hist...>

Spent 15 hours on the road today. Started on the Alabama coast at 7AM and got to Chicago at 10PM. It was between 75 and 80 degrees F until it started raining in southern Indiana around 5pm. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 degrees F by Indianapolis, 40 degrees by West Lafayette, and right at 32-33 in Chicago. Nasty rain from Indianapolis to Chicago, but at least it was wet and not frozen. From what I heard, there was sleet and frozen garbage in the Chicago area all the way until 8 or 9 pm.

Lots of people on the road, I don't think anyone was changing their plans based on the forecast. The strong northerly wind helped my car do 37mpg when normally I would expect 31-32 on that trip.

Meanwhile, it was 80 degrees in Atlanta today. It's funny how the weather can be so different in regions that really aren't all that far apart.

Georgia is going to swing right back to freezing, just wait. We always have 50 degree oscillations to usher in spring.

Praise the stormlord!

Portland was wild. Lightly snowing when I left to pickup my kids. 3 hours and troves of stuck cars (including my own) later, made it back home w/ help. Seems like half the city was stuck on the road.

Blizzard warning for Los Angeles? Did i read that right? lol

The beauty of LA is that all the seasons are within driving distance. There are mountain ranges all around, high land between and behind them, and peaks as high as 10,000 ft. All within the county line. Yeah, you get blizzard warnings sometimes.

I want to ride on the Snow Piercer train.

My experience recently with the train going up the east coast during snow storms on my travel to US: you don't want to be stuck for hours in the middle of nowhere, imo.

Well that depends, getting stuck isn’t so bad if you have a luxurious room amongst the privileged elites enjoying 5 course meals.

Sucks if you’re rationing crackers with the unwashed masses where you might be lucky to have some kind of grab handle.

I would perhaps sit on the roof, as I eat rotisserie chickens.

>you don't want to be stuck for hours in the middle of nowhere, imo.

don't take up ocean sailing!

But in the carriage with privileged drug abusing fashionistas, just like real life

I haven't watched the show yet, but I've read about the general premise of this show (and the book it was based on). It really makes no sense to me; am I missing something?

If the world turns into "snowball Earth", it seems like the last place you want to be is in a moving vehicle. I guess an airplane would be even worse, but I don't see why you'd want people in a never-stopping train. It feels like this whole story was just contrived.

In reality, in such a situation if you're some super-rich person, you'd want to set up some kind of underground city. Being underground, it'd be protected from the frigid weather outside, it'd be somewhat warm (caves stay at a constant temperature year-round), and you'd have space to do things like grow food using artificial lighting, and you wouldn't have to worry about mechanical breakdown suddenly exposing everyone to the weather and killing them.

The oceans are warming, right? Maybe a submarine city. Cruise around, pop up on some nice beaches.

I want to go swimming in the ocean.

you are right of course. a train might make sense if it is to hot, using the movement to cool down, but then too going underground would be better.

but if you ignore that problem the show becomes enjoyable.

This reminds me of "The Martian": the initial set-up was completely impossible, but if you ignore that the movie was pretty good.

I think the idea is that the train was pre-existing, and it has some kind of perpetual motion engine which keeps it going and which the occupants can siphon off heat for warmth and electricity.

Ok, but if you have a perpetual motion engine (or at least a nuclear reactor with basically unlimited fuel), wouldn't it make more sense to take it out of the train, put it into an underground building, and live there? There's plenty of pre-existing underground spaces in large cities, even with their own train systems. It wouldn't be that hard to abandon the above-ground stuff for the most part, and start expanding the below-ground stuff for people to live in.

Even modern-day trains don't cope well with heavy snowfall; the idea of the last vestiges of humanity living on a train traveling around the world endlessly, where they have to worry about being derailed by the weather at any time, doesn't seem to make sense.

Honestly, that isn’t even the most ridiculous thing about the movie! Haha

Heading to my girlfriend's house, not looking forward to shoveling my car out tomorrow

Meanwhile high of 61 predicted for NJ.

Ain’t weather chaos fun?

Supposed to break 70 tomorrow in central PA. But chaos? Nah... simply an intense frontal system (ie. big temperature gradients).

getting hailed on in San Diego at the moment

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