New Weather Service website offers superlocal forecasts

Partial screenshot of new National Weather Service page for the Juneau office.
Partial screenshot of new National Weather Service page for the Juneau office.

Frequent visitors to the National Weather Service’s webpages will have to reset their bookmarks. The federal agency went live on Wednesday with a planned overhaul of their Alaska sites.

“For standardization and, ironically, for simplicity is the main reasons behind our changes,” said Tom Ainsworth, meteorologist-in-charge at the Juneau office of the National Weather Service.

Ainsworth said it’s all part of an agencywide change to move toward standardized websites that take advantage of the latest technology.

“So, if you were to look for information in either Atlanta or Washington or Los Angeles, you would find it very similar to the Juneau weather service webpage. We’re trying to do things more consistently,” Ainsworth said.

“Second, managing the data on the web page is an incredible amount of time and attention,” Ainsworth said.

He said centralized units around the country help local weather offices like Juneau to manage the complex web pages.

Some Alaskans have already expressed confusion with the new look, broken bookmarks, missing information, and apparent unfriendliness of the new website. But Ainsworth said they advertised the change months in advance by posting a notice on their office’s homepage, adding a link to the beta version of the new site, and posting a help guide. They also conducted several interviews and held an open house at the Juneau office last month.

“We’ve done our best to try to let people know these changes are coming, but I completely agree that change is constant and difficult to accept at times,” Ainsworth said. “It just shows how important weather information is to those that use our information. We will do whatever it takes to make sure that information that customers are used to getting will return, and hopefully in a better and more intuitive way down the road.”

Ainsworth urges Alaskans to spend a few minutes to explore and find what they need. The Anchorage office of the National Weather Service has even produced a video tutorial on the new site.

Ainsworth said the new website allows them to automate digital information like observations from unmanned stations, and display them either in a map or table.

Another new feature is the point-and-click forecast. It allows anyone to get a land or marine forecast – not just for a region or zone, but – for any one-and-a-half square mile section selected.

“Imagine a screen over all of Southeast Alaska and that screen has 89,000 points,” Ainsworth said. “That’s the resolution that we’re trying to get weather forecasts available to our customers.”

Computer forecast models usually come up with the big picture forecast that is fine-tuned and adjusted by human forecasters based on what they know about the local area.

Under the old format, zone forecasts would include an average or generalization of temperatures, wind direction and speed and other conditions. Those forecasts would gloss over the local effects of irregular terrain that can vary by several thousand feet of elevation within just a few miles.

“Really, what we’re encouraging is go right to where you’re interested in,” Ainsworth said. “To ease that transition, we’ve selected some populated and some frequented areas such as airports and city locations in Southeast Alaska.”

Screen capture of National Weather Service forecast for the Stikine River.
Screen capture of National Weather Service forecast for the Stikine River.

As an example, the Thursday forecast for downtown Wrangell called for early afternoon showers and west winds. That’s a little different than the forecast for the nearby Stikine River near the Canadian border that called for early evening showers, southwest winds, and a high temperature that was expected to be 4 degrees warmer.

Ainsworth said they’ve already heard plenty of comments about the change, both negative and positive. He asks that Alaskans keep those comments coming. They’ll incorporate changes as they work out kinks or bugs in the website over the next few months.

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