METEOROLOGY
Fed up with the imprecise regional weather reports broadcast on TV? A Minneapolis-based meteorology site has you on its radar.
Digital Cyclone's My-Cast.com gives you highly targeted forecasts via Web or email, pinpointing weather patterns within a 4- to 11-mile area around your home, office, cabin, travel destination, or other locations within the 48 contiguous states. The free Web service has about 200,000 subscribers, who log on daily or receive periodic email weather updates, warnings, and advisories on when they should, say, golf, garden, or grill. The year-old service recently added Mobile My-Cast, which sends streaming weather alerts and maps to subscribers' Palms and WAP phones for about $20 a year.
Every three hours, Digital Cyclone pushes official National Weather Service data through MM5 software, a weather modeling system developed at Penn State. The company then crunches the data to produce 6 million forecasts, zeroing in on microclimates in most metropolitan areas. By constrast, the NWS divides the nation into standard 20-mile squares and provides reports every six hours that typically focus on larger regional conditions.
"We're blending output from national computer models with output from these higher-resolution, higher-frequency MM5 models that factor in local variations in terrain, vegetation, and proximity to water," explains Digital Cyclone founder Paul Douglas, who is also a well-known weather personality on WCCO-TV.
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