Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

So it isn't Death Valley, but it is the Mojave...

Eastern Mojave Heritage Trail (Needles to Ivanpah) trip report

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Im planning to head out to DV next week for CA4WD’s “Escape from Death Valley” event. I don’t normally do organized things but I thought I’d check this out and have some company on some new-to-me trails. Anyway, I haven’t been able to get the DV-specific weather service page to work.
https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/vef/rec/index.php?loc=DV
I have always found this site to be very useful but it’s been “unavailable” for a while. Have any of you noticed this, and is there a good alternative other than piecing together various forecast locations?

 

NOAA NWS website it what I always use. Towards the bottom there's a "forecast discussion" link that's pretty useful as well.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=36.448&lon=-116.8658#.Y2R2G9LMKUk

 

Yeah, that’s the fallback. The other link I posted was also NOAA NWS with several locations within the NP and buttons for cloud cover, rain, wind, temp, snow; all either current or day-by-day forecast for 3 or 4 days ahead. A pretty useful site.

 

Did they change the route from what is posted on their site? Most of the original posted itinerary is closed at the moment (Keane Wonder, Titus, West Side, Warm Springs).

Weather page shows unavailable for all the tabs for me as well. Haven’t looked at that site for a number of months though!

I see Death Valley broke another rainfall record today - “Trace”. First time any precipitation has fallen on Nov 3rd since record keeping began in 1911.

 

Works for me
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?zoneid=CAZ522

 

https://caltopo.com/

Great online tool for computer and phone, even has an app. There's a live "weather station" layer for conditions, a wind plot, geology, fire data, and live satellite imagery. Good offline support too with downloadable layers.

 

Yes, it has changed significantly, unfortunately with a lot more highway transit sections. A few people have dropped out so the numbers will be lower. They have a permit from DVNP.

 

Nice.

 

I am a big fan of Caltopo -- my app of choice for making maps. And yes, good offline support.

 

The forecast discussion is interesting. For my region it’s pretty human-readable:

“SYNOPSIS...Under thin high clouds and fairly clear skies, folks
will be waking up to cold temperatures with the best potential for frost
in the interior Central Coast. Sunny and mild Friday afternoon.”​

For the Las Vegas region, it’s more oriented to other meteorologists. Or weather geeks:

“Ensemble guidance remains in good
agreement with the synoptic setup. A highly-amplified pattern
appears poised to take shape early next week, with a ridge extending
up into northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. Downstream, an
anomalously-deep trough (-3 sigma) is forecast to dig down the
Pacific Coast …”​

 

I usually just stick with Weather Underground.

 

Agreed. Seems to be the most accurate forecast in my experience (when compared to the weather channel and the Apple weather app).

 

I think they should mostly be the same now. Apple switched to Wx Channel and Wx Channel owns Weather Underground and all that is owned by IBM.

Could be worse. You could be reading this

 

The are definitely not the same

 

Well crap, you made me think and look stuff up:

 

The results. Not the display.

 

Makes sense to me but I learned how to decipher METARS when I was working on my private pilot certificate.

 

The top two match, but the bottom one is slightly different (1-2 degrees).

 

The think

For sure.

The hard part about weather has always been measuring. I joined Wunderground almost 20 years ago when I got my first weather station and hooked it up to their "citizen scientist" network. I know there are a number of different networks used to make predictions. The stations aren't necessarily any different, just maintained by governments. With Wunderground, there are weather stations in so many places. Add that to the ability for satellites to measure water temps and even wind speed/direction, accuracy has improved.

I've always felt Wundergound was more accurate at predictions just for the shear amount of data they gather and processing power they are able to throw at the problem. Accuracy also depends on having good measurements and having say a hundred weather stations in 10 square miles makes the forecast more accurate that had you relied only on stations at airports where you get much less data. The temps might be different but the methods are the same but averaged over a greater area so less accurate. Sure, the numbers might not match 100% and there are any number of reasons why that might be.

Japan had one of the largest Supercomputers devoted to meteorology and they were only able to accurately predict for something like a few square miles (and I mean a machine in the top 10 supercomputers). That always surprised me.