The long drought inconveniently ended on Friday night, just as I was about to ride a bike across the city. I wasn’t sure if I should wait for the rain to stop, or take transit. Googling around for a radar picture, I found the King City weather station feed on the Environment Canada website. It updates often, and you can customize it to show Southern Ontario details like highways and rivers. On Friday night the rain stretched from Toronto to Stratford, meaning it wasn’t ending anytime soon. So for the first time this month I used a rather pristine, unscratched and unswiped just-out-of-the-envelope August Metropass. It was a reminder at how efficient biking riding can be around town, and had me wondering why I still have the passes mailed to me.
Yesterday the showers were more spotty — it was neat to watch the colourful “rain” areas head to my neighbhourhood and then actually fall outside. This radar seems precise enough that you could plan your own trip around the city to avoid rain drops. There are also other weather stations you can click on for other parts of Ontario and Canada.
8 comments
That is a USEFUL link.
This is one from the Weather Underground:
http://www.wunderground.com/radar/radblast.asp?ID=BUF
It has more features, including zoom, and I think is more clear.
Canadian weather forecasting is the worst. Most of the time Canadian radar shows images that are over an hour old.
Go with the better funded Americans.
http://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=no
or another good one is
http://www.intellicast.com
Jay> So when I look at the King City weather page, and it says updated at 11am, it’s lying to me?
it’s not lying at all. the radar images on the Weatheroffice site are updated every 10 minutes, approximately 3 minutes after the capture was made from the radar station. being a radar addict, i can assure that is true.
the american radar stations are good too, though, for when they reach into canadian territory
laurence> Thanks…it looked up to date/minute, and my empirical head-out-the-window check seemed to match up with the radar image.
Maybe Jay is a disgruntled former King City Radar Employee 🙂
Don’t believe the hype! The weather report is just propoganda to keep you inside your car!
Actually that King Radar site is good. I just skipped over the Environment Canada and immediately thought of the weather network. They are always an hour behind it seems. The radar sites mentioned in this post are actually quite good indeed.