Appropriate Technology - A Weather Map That Updates To Your Android Phone

I have a bit of an unusual background. I spent some of my formative years on a small boat. Think Gilligan's Island with a less competent captain and crew.

Along the way, I learned a lot of weird skills. I can tie up a boat, fight a shipboard fire, launch flares, inflate a Zodiac and a lifeboat, use a VHF radiotelephone, etc.

But what I really learned is the power of the weather. On a small boat, waves bigger than your boat is scary. Fish bigger than you are scarier even when they don't have vertical fins. (Cue "Baby Shark" thirty years too early.)

Now that I live in actual rain forest, when it is not flaming, I found a need to stop having the weather interpreted for me by the well meaning local AM radio station, weather.com, various weather services, or even our friends at the National Weather Service.

I wanted actual weather radar images I could interpret myself.

But I didn't want to have to click on links every time. I wanted the image files _right there_

Fortunately, your taxpayer dollars pay for these radar images, and they are at static URLs.

Now I needed a tool that could put them on my Android phone. I found one, showr. The paid version is long gone, but the freeware version still has a valid apk floating around.

https://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/wfo/mtr/ft.jpg

https://radar.weather.gov/lite/N0R/MUX_loop.gif

If you live in or near the USA and you want to borrow this trick, go through these sites for the images most appropriate to your area.

Other weather tools are legion. There is one that sends text messages to satellite communicators. There are many others that allow you to collect weather data at home. Sensors abound in the San Francisco Bay Area. Example: https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KCALOSGA226

This particular tool is invaluable to me, because the images are downloaded to my phone and stay available even when I am out of coverage range.

Technology is awesome. Unless the Pakistani and the Indians choose to throw some at each other. Then I get to write an article on trans-Pacific fallout and the weather becomes deadlier than ever.