SLOweather

No matter what the winter was like, dry and cold, or wet and warm (like last winter), local CDF always claims that the next fire season could be one of the worst ever.

If you live in or adjacent to a wild land as we do, fire is always a concern. I’ve listened to the local fire departments for years on a varying array of scanners, especially during fire season. A few years ago I set up a ShoutCast server to broadcast my scanner onto the net so I could monitor it from work.

This year I redid the service as a Windows Media Encoder. There’s a link available on the SLOWeather links page. At this time, it will support up to 5 concurrent listeners. I can bump that up if it becomes popular.

Right now, there are 2 channels mixed on the server, SLO County fire, and CDF local.

What’s your favorite source for weather forecasts on the Internet? Most sites seem to simply repackage the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts. AccuWeather and The Weather Channel have their own meteorologists to make their own predictions. Maybe Intellicast does as well. There are links to the SLO forecast for all 4 of these on the current SLOWeather home page.

Some comments about the NWS. Our forecasts come out of the Oxnard office, so, even though we are at the northern limit of their forecast area, I think we get better service from them. And they have some other cool products that the other sites don’t have, like the 3 hour lightning probability, and the graphic precip forecast. And I like reading the NWS Forecast discussion, too.

I’m in the process of redesigning the SLOWeather pages. A few days ago I added a Statcounter to the home page. It collects an interesting array of information about the visitors to SLOWeather.

While there are the expected local users from around the county (SLO, Paso, Arroyo Grande, etc), we also get visitors from places like Fresno, Mountain View, Sacramento, Seattle, Phoenix, Salmon ID, and Orlando.

Something happened with DNS Friday morning, and the SLOWeather blog was unavailable. It’s back now. Sorry for the inconvenience.