Weather Underground's latest feature presses the boundary

Google Maps has been around for a while but I'm repeatedly amazed by the addition of features by both Google and third parties via the public API. I recently uncovered a new feature from the venerable meteorological site Weather Underground called the WunderMap. WunderMap is a customized weather layer atop the already familiar Google maps engine. However unlike standard radar, the WunderMap displays real time data which includes current storm activity and trajectory.

After playing around with the service during several thunderstorms I'm simply amazed at the product. The fidelity of the information is hard to match and it's a sure bet that if you zoom into your neighborhood and see a large red blog over your location that it's raining pretty hard outside. More incredible is the storm velocity and direction indicator which predicts where the storm is headed in the near future.

I've long been a fan of the National Weather Service's RIDGE Radar product which displays doplar and composite images and will track approximate rainfall. The WunderMap does one better by showing storm severity and direction which is vastly more important to everyday crowd. My only complaint is that WunderMap is fairly hard to find on Weather Underground's already cluttered site. The best bet is to plug in your location and to search for the WunderMap link from your customized forecast page. It's a fun little application to play around with during a storm and will automatically refresh. Just leave the window open and enjoy!

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