Way to get weather forecast by latitude and longitude?

June 17, 2019 4:34 PM

I need a solution to this problem: I often camp, say, at least an hour away from the closest town/hamlet/configuration of permanent domiciles. In Colorado, that also often means camping at a very different altitude from said town, so the nearest weather forecast is useless. I need to be able to look up the weather forecast by latitude and longitude for actual accuracy. Does such a thing exist out there?
posted by sugarbomb to Grab Bag (10 answers total)

For the National Weather Service forecast, just replace the numbers in this link:

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=39.73&textField2=-104.98
posted by XMLicious at 4:47 PM on June 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

I don't know the details of the method, but the NWS forecasts do take altitude into account. You can do your own corrections using a rule of thumb for temperature change with altitude.
posted by wnissen at 4:55 PM on June 17, 2019

Just want to warn you this method is fraught with peril. Many websites will return a weather forecast for the nearest weather station, which may very well be 2000' above or below you or on the other side of an important ridge.
posted by Nelson at 5:14 PM on June 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Dark Sky says they have hyper local weather forecasting that is based on longitude/latitude and not by city or weather station. For example, it gave me very different stats and forecast for Rocky Mountain National Park and the summit of Longs Peak.
posted by zsazsa at 6:15 PM on June 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Seconding Dark Sky. Looks like there's an API to get weather for a given lat/lon.
posted by gregr at 8:41 PM on June 17, 2019

As a CO native, I regret to report that there is really no reliable way to plan for weather in most of the state, and that meteorologists delight in the vagaries of weather systems like what you see daily on the Front Range. Good luck.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:09 PM on June 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

The NWS point forecast page is poorly designed, including several different parts, but the actual multi day forecast for the grid square definitely is altitude corrected. Note that it has a scrollable map page where you can click to select a new grid square, handy if you don’t know the latitude and longitude.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 6:30 AM on June 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

The NWS is awesome, and I think most (all?) weather sites just re-interpret the same data that NWS collects. So I choose to just go to the source.

Definitely scour the links on XMLicious' page. There are a lot of useful tools there like the hourly forecast and 'forecast discussion'. I really like the discussion; being able to read what the forecasters are thinking is useful. I find the detail of how they are arriving at specific details really interesting, especially if you start following it a week before your trip and see how the models start converging.

But, I also agree that mountain weather is unpredictable and forecasts are not replacement for being prepared.
posted by stobor at 7:32 AM on June 18, 2019

NWS point forecasts are pretty good in this regard; you can click on a point on the map that will give you the weather for that zone, taking altitude into account.

Open Snow does good work for forecasting snowfall and weather at ski resorts. They rolled out a summer product, Open Summit. Might be worth a look as well.
posted by craven_morhead at 10:48 AM on June 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

For backcountry climbing forecasts, I use a combination of mountain-forecast.com and weather.gov mentioned above.

Mountain-forecast lets you choose a mountain and will give you temp and condition forecasts for various elevations up and down the mountain. It can be a little optimistic but is still a good resource; just choose the peak nearest your campsite and then find the closest elevations and triangulate from there.

Weather.gov is less optimistic and more neutral, and you can get pretty close to your elevation and position on the clickable maps.

Between the two (and rarely DarkSky too) I/you can get a good idea of the parameters of what conditions will be and go from there; just make sure you have appropriate CYA equipment depending on what you’ll be doing and how far you’ll be from a car/civilization.
posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 11:16 AM on June 18, 2019