Do They Have Weather Underground?
“Ohhh, eight carousels, we’re in for a real treat.” - Marge Simpson
One of the first little anecdotes that early adopters of the World Wide Web liked to brag about to people who weren’t yet on-line was the ability to get a weather report from anywhere in the world. Through the magic of your 2400 baud modem you could find out the weather in Singapore, just because. It was silly and it was pointless, but it was interesting and novel because it was from the other side of the world and you got it through your computer.
Now, of course, there are countless ways to get your weather on-line. You can have it e-mailed to you; you can personalize your Google/Yahoo/MSN/AOL home page to display your weather forecast when you first open the browser; or you can look it up on any one of a dozen sites. Personally, I’m a fan of www.wunderground.com and I’ve been using it for almost a decade now. It’s got a simple and easy interface, I can switch quickly to another location just by typing in a city or a zip code and the local radar tells me with amazing precision if I’m going to get rained on should I decide to take a walk. Those are all handy things to have in a weather site, but they aren’t the reason I’ve stuck with this one for so long. It’s the pretty pictures that have kept me coming back all these years.
Every time I load a page, a weather picture appears in a banner at the top of the screen and in a thumbnail on the left. To call these “weather photos” is a bit of a stretch. To qualify all they usually need is some part of the sky in the background, though even that is optional. What makes them so great is the endless variety. With each page load you might get a stunning mountain view in Alaska, or drab flooding in Europe. It ranges all over the world and while some of the pictures are better than others the overall quality of them is nothing short of amazing.
Here’s the best part, you can click on the banner or the thumbnail to see a full size image along with information about where it was taken and the user who took it. When you click through to the full image it also loads a new and different banner and thumbnail. You can just keep clicking and you’ll keep getting new, often quite beautiful, images from around the world taken by ordinary people. It’s addicting.
There’s rarely anyone in the image. It’s usually just landscape (or cityscape) and sky, a small daily reminder of all the strange and wonderful places that you otherwise would never have thought about. There isn’t anything profound about this, and for all I know there are multitudes of photography websites out there where you can do the exact same thing, but this little window into parts of the world that you ordinarily wouldn’t see is very reassuring on some basic level. It isn’t like seeing images of far away places on the news when some awful event is occurring, nor is it like seeing travel shows that focus on tourist destinations or exotic nature. Rather, these are images that ordinary people take in and around the places that they live.
It’s livens up the daily routine of checking the weather but it’s also a reminder of just how much world is out there.
