How can I find an accurate detailed weather forecast for Hainan China?

September 24, 2012 10:03 PM

How can I find an accurate detailed weather forecast for Hainan China?

How can I find an accurate detailed weather forecast for Hainan China?

Specifically I'd like to know when rain is coming, at what time approximately, and for how long it will last.

The best website I've found is weather underground, but it's not even that good.

Isn't there someway to know when it's raining 20 km west of me, and that the winds are moving at 7km an hour so it will hit me in about 3 hours???

it seems like that should be completely feasible by now, with GPS, satellites, channel 6 doppler tracker and all.

I think that part of the problem is that I'm in a small island of China.

posted by crawltopslow to Science & Nature (3 answers total)

You're in Hainan now? It seems like you don't read Chinese but you can still look on www.baidu.com, China's largest search engine. You can search in english and a 10-day forecast will come up. You can also watch the CCTV English channel. China's weather forecasting is pretty advanced and this is definitely possible; I would assume that Chinese sources would be more specific/accurate than general weather websites.

Unless I am missing something from your question?
posted by bearette at 11:45 PM on September 24, 2012

If this were the US, I'd augment my weather searching for maritime forecasts. Not sure where you'd find that sort of thing in China, nor whether or not you can find that information in English, but presumably that sort of forecast is useful to fishermen and others at sea. Might want to expand your search a bit.

Similar to this (which is published out of Hong Kong). Google also turns up a Hainan Meteorological Bureau.
posted by jquinby at 6:43 AM on September 25, 2012

http://www.yr.no/ (change to English at the top right) is the best worldwide weather site I have found - especially their hour by hour view which shows which hours rain is expected. Of course it's still a forecast, not a perfect prediction.
posted by samj at 11:44 AM on September 25, 2012