Astronomical Forecast Dashboard

A Visual Dashboard of the Best Weather Forecasts for Astronomers

Save time with at-a-glance forecasts and shortcuts to the exact astronomical weather information needed for Texas, North America, and world wide. All of the hard work is done by others, I built this page to save me time drilling down though website menus to get what I need.

Some of these tools are interactive 3rd party widgets that may not work correctly on legacy browsers or operating systems. I test this page in iOS and with a recent version of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on macOS. To customize this page to your own needs, please see the customization instructions at the bottom of this page.

Extended forecasts for Austin Astronomers

National Weather Service Graphical Interactive Sky Cover Forecast Map

National Weather Service Extended Forecast Chart

Astrospheric forecasting for North American astronomers

Clear Dark Sky Astronomical Forecast


Clear Dark Sky Forecast History / Climate Information

NWS Sky Cover Forecast for Texas

Forecasts for the United States

NOAA Water Vapor Satellite

NOAA IR Satellite

Smoke and Dust

Saharan & North American Dust

Wildfire Smoke Plume Map

Also available, the NOAA HRRR-Smoke interactive map

Longer Range US Forecasts

These forecasts are relative to the normal precipitationfor the indicated period.

6-10 Day Outlook for Precipitation

8-14 Day Outlook for Precipitation

14-28 Day Outlook for Precipitation

SubX 3-4 week Subseasonal eXpermintal forecasts

SubX is a large ensamble model from George Mason University and the University of Miami that is showing success with long range forecasts. The image below shows individual component forecasts, with the SubX ensamble last. Follow the link for a detailed interactive version.

Seasonal Outlook for Precipitation

Locations that I'm interested in

Capulin - Clayton, New Mexico - chart or map

Enchanted Rock Natural Area, Texas - chart or map

Flagstaff, Arizona - chart or map

French Camp, Mississippi - chart or map

Holly Springs, North Carolina - chart or map

Lake Tahoe, California - chart or map

Marathon, Texas - chart or map

Pedernales Falls State Park, Texas - chart or map

Silver City, New Mexico - chart or map

Terlingua / Big Bend, Texas - chart or map

Meteoblue World Wide Astronomical Seeing

Meteoblue has good coverage outside of North America. North America specific forecasts from other sources may be more accurate.

Customization

If you have a little knowledge of HTML markup you can easily customize this page to your own needs. You might want to change locations for forecasts, add other forecasts that you use, or avoid loading ones that you don't use or that don't work with your computer. To do this:

  1. Save this page to your local computer's desktop. In most browsers this will be done from the main menu File menu via "Save As..." or something similar like "Save Page As..."
  2. Open the file you saved in a text editor and add the following text to the <head> section of the document near the top:
    <base href="http://astronomy.robpettengill.org/" />
  3. Now you can make any customizations you want to the file and it will still be able to find style sheet and image resources on this site.
  4. Save your modified file.
  5. When you open the saved file, it should open in your browser with your modifications.
  6. Your are welcome to host your modified page on your own web site with an acknowledgement and link back to this page.


Content created: 2016-05-18 and last modified: 2023-11-13

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