Links to external sites for Weather, Road, and Snow Conditions

NOAA Weather Forecasts
for a known city or ZIP code

Red River (starting point for anywhere)   This is the Red River forecast, but it has a box for entering any US city (or ZIP code), so it serves as a starting point for anywhere.  (Note that the format for entering a new city in the box is city name followed by a comma, a space, and the two-letter state abbreviation.)
You'll find it handy to bookmark the places of interest to you when you first get their forecasts.

NOAA Weather – Gridpoint Forecasts
for arbitrary locations selected from a map

Gridpoint forecasts are interpolations from data entered by NOAA forecasters.  They were made possible a few years ago by a change in the way the forecasters recorded their forecasts.  The Central Region was the first to offer these, on an experimental basis, but it now seems to be the nationwide standard.  Even the regular "city" forecasts, like the ones from the section above, seem to be gridpoint forecasts.  The nominal geographic precision in most parts of the country is a few miles, but of course in mountainous areas interpolation is a risky business!
A further explanation of gridpoint forecasts can be found here.

Clickable gridpoint maps:
These maps will generate a gridpoint forecast from the map coordinates.  This is the only way to get a gridpoint forecast without entering a city name or ZIP code.  There's supposed to be a way to use this facility by directly entering latitude and longitude, but it's a well-kept secret (and not known to this author).  The maps are fairly broad area, typically a couple hundred miles on a side – there are three that overlap Colorado.  They have only county lines and a few larger cities marked, so clicking on a desired skiing or hiking area involves correlating this map with a topo map or highway map.

Rather than have lots of links to the various areas, it's easier to start with a clickable national map which shows all the areas.  The link below has a map for the entire country, and shows each gridpoint region (including Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico!).  Note that the actual maps cover overlapping rectangular areas, each of which encompasses one of the irregular regions shown on the national map.  To get to a clickable gridpoint map, start with the link below and click, as best you can, on the part of the state for which you would like a forecast.

Note: Each forecast page, including those obtained by typing in a city name, has on it a finer-scale clickable gridpoint map covering the nearby area.

National Index Map   for gridpoint forecasts.  (Note that this link is the home page for the NOAA Southern Regional Headquarters.  It just happens to have a clickable national map, and one that is better than those at the other regional home pages.)

Following is the map you will see (this one's not clickable, of course!).  Don't take the instruction "Click city for local weather information" too literally.  What you'll get is a clickable gridpoint map for the region named for that city.

Clicking on the "Grand Junction" Colorado region will bring up the Web page for the Grand Junction forecast office, which will have the following gridpoint map (again, this one's not clickable).  This map covers most of the areas in which we ski.  Clicking anywhere on the map will generate an interpolated forecast for that point, generally labeled with the name of a nearby (possibly microscopic) town.
The format seems to vary between the NOAA Regions, but at least in Colorado the forecast will include latitude, longitude, and elevation.
Note the difficulty of determining where to click for places not named on the map!

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NOAA Weather – Advanced Formats - Hourly Forecasts

Tabular Forecasts and Element Meteorograms are, respectively, tabular and graphical displays of hour-by-hour weather elements for the city or point of interest.  They are invoked from links on a regular forecast page, whether selected by city or by a map gridpoint (see "NOAA Weather - Gridpoint Forecasts" section above). They seem to be available for the Central, Southern, and Eastern NOAA regions, but not the Western (cf Region map below).  NOTE: Gridpoint forecasts always seem to have links for these two formats, but it seems that, in the Eastern region only, forecasts selected by city do not.

NOAA's details about these two formats can be found here. This is the same page referenced above as a tutorial on pinpoint forecasts.

A key feature of these two formats is that you may select the weather elements you wish included, then click a button to generate the table or graph.

Tabular Forecasts give data for your selected elements for a 72-hour period.Element Meteorograms cover 48 hours, but otherwise the two forms are just different presentations of the same data.

The links for these two forecasts are found on the forecast page in a section in the lower right corner, in a group with some other links labeled "Additional Forecasts & Information".  The particular links in that group will vary between locations, depending upon the types of information available, but in the regions which offer these two forecasts there will always (?) be two links labeled "Tabular Forecast" and "Hourly Weather Graph". The Hourly Weather Graph is the Element Meteorogram.

This is an example of the "Additional Forecasts & Information" section on a forecast page:

Following is an example of an Element Meteorogram (Hourly Weather Graph).  Note that six elements have been selected for display: temperature, dew point, wind chill, wind (speed and direction), rain, and snow.  Note also the gray box at the bottom of the graphic – it gives the forecasted values for a specific hour for ten of the eleven possible elements (wind chill is the missing one).  The hour is specified by clicking anywhere on one of the hour lines in the graph area!  Fancy, no?
[Note: The Element Meteorogram display requires that Java (not just JavaScript) be enabled in your browser.  If you don't know what that means, don't worry – it almost certainly doesn't apply to you.]

Following is an example of a Tabular Forecast:

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NOAA Regions

The following map shows the NOAA "Regions" in the lower 48 States.  The four regions are Central, Western, Southern, and Eastern.  (The regions aren't labeled on the map, but you can figure it out!) Two other Regions are Pacific (covering Hawaii) and Alaska.  (This graphic was taken from some since-forgotten page of since-forgotten purpose, but it shows the regions nicely.)

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Road Conditions

Colorado   Current conditions for a great number of road segments.  Drop-down menu allows filtering to a region of interest.

Colorado – Alerts and Restrictions   Subset of the above, showing only segments flagged with an alert or a restriction, including details of same.

Weather Stations   operated by Colorado Dept of Transportation.  Clickable state map with symbols for weather stations, some including Web cameras.  Weather stations with a Webcam have this symbol:   Links next to the state map lead to expanded maps of particular areas.
This is the map you will see:

Clicking, for example, on the Vail Pass symbol, which includes a Webcam, yields the following image:

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Snow Conditions   (still TBD)