COD Library: Meteorology: Websites

Learning and Research

American Meteorological Society Weather Resources: Resources selected by the nation’s premier scientific and professional organization promoting and disseminating information about the atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic sciences.
American Geosciences Institute: For students and educators: Data, career info, "Critical issues" related to climate, energy, natural hazards as well.
Weather Underground: Forecast and weather data collected from over 100,000 member personal weather stations, located in homes, schools, and other locations around the country. Weather enthusiasts still blog regularly about local, regional, and global weather and climate related issues.
EPA's Guide to Natural Disasters: The EPA lists both homeowner and EPA responses to different types of natural disasters.

Data Sources

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Check out the "frequently accessed tools" to get to weather forecasting and data, climate data and reports, satellite imagery and more. (Data can also be found in data.gov.)
National Weather Service
Provides weather, water, and climate data, forecasts and warnings for the protection of life and property
Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis
The NSIDC collects information about snow and ice coverage in the Arctic throughout the year (historical info available too.) Charts, tables, images.
Data.gov
Find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more from government sources.
Earth Data
Data collected from NASA about the atmosphere, solar radiation, land, the ocean, and many more topics.
Natural Disasters
Natural Disaster logs from FEMA, listed by state/tribal government and by year.
Climate Change Knowledge Portal
Developed by the World Bank, and using data from a number of organizations, this aims to be a source of international Climate Change data and tools, international climate change plans, projected water levels, etc.

Evaluate Websites

While you're doing Google searches to either narrow your topic or in order to dig up more information on certain subject, you want to be careful to decide if the information you find is trustworthy.

When it comes to science, nearly everyone has opinions: should we be labeling genetically modified food for consumer's awareness? What will fracking do for our economy or to our groundwater supply? Your job is to evaluate the information you can find through search engines such as Google to find the good websites--those written by authors with clear expertise, with up-to-date information.

Authorship: Who created this website? What is their background on the topic? Are they trustworthy?

Bias/Mission: Why was the website created? What point of view does the author or website have? Does that limit the facts they present or how the facts are presented?

Date: How old is the information that is presented? Is it still accurate?

Questions? Check out the COD Library's guide to evaluating information.