Tips for the TV Forecaster in the Northeast

Moving to a new TV market is tough. I’m putting together some of the most important websites you’ll need to hit the ground running. Good Luck!

Forecasting in the Northeast can be overwhelming, especially if you start in the middle of winter! You could be dealing with lake effect snow, ice storms, sleet, freezing rain and blizzards! Here are some of the best web links to get your forecast off the computer and on the air.

After looking at the radar and satellite, (if your shop doesn’t have what you need, go to the National Weather Service Eastern Region Headquarters and Aviation Weather), follow these steps to make a forecast:

Take a look at Unisys Weather at your synoptic scale models to get storm placement, flow patterns, and 850 mb temperatures (this is available at Unisys Weather). Unisys also has the local Skew-T’s, but forecast soundings are also available here.

After you’ve figured out what’s going on in the larger scale, you can get down to the more nitty-gritty mesoscale (especially for lake-effect and even rain/snow lines).  What I typically use for this is a tool called BUFKIT which is available at Buffalo, NY National Weather Service for download along with the required data sets.

Also, especially good for lake-effect snow, is the MM5 model, which is available at SUNY Stony Brook MM5 Mesoscale Forecasts.

To wrap this up and get a good idea of the next 7 days of weather, a good standby for the latest and most complete suite of extended model runs (e.g. the GFS) is NCEP Model Analyses and Forecasts.

Of course, you’ll also need a temperature forecast to compare all of your graphical data against for a highs/lows forecast.  The best place to find MOS (Model Output Statistics) is Current NWS MOS Forecast Products.

If you’d like to learn more about forecasting lake-effect snow or other winter weather phenomena, check out this website MetEd Home Page and become a member.

Another great option is to check out Haby Hints, developed by meteorologist Jeff Haby from Mississippi State University. You can go to his website and search for pretty much any weather term, and get an easy explanation of how to predict and forecast weather.

Happy forecasting!