After seeing a poor white Peugeot toppled over completely by the wind and waves along Paignton seafront on Wednesday evening I thought it would be nice to be topical and relate this article to the weather somehow. I must be honest in saying that this is possibly going to turn into one of my least enthusiastic articles to date as unfortunately I am not even remotely interested in the weather; as far as I´m concerned I wake up in the morning whatever the weather is like is fine with me. At the end of the day there is nothing that we can do to control the weather so I personally feel that unless it is something really important like a flood or hurricane most the time there is little point in the man on the street worrying what lies ahead.

Having said that, some people live their lives by the weather; if it is rainy they won´t go out but if it´s sunny they´ll drop everything they were supposed to be doing and sit in the garden. These are the people who will gain most from today´s article.

There are two sites that I looked at potentially reviewing this week; Metoffice.com and Weather.com but after viewing both resources, my focus today is going to be towards the later site as personally I found the Met Office site a little lacklustre.

Upon browsing Weather.com you are presented with a recently taken Satellite image of the UK along with a number of different categories that can be selected depending on exactly what it is that you wish to know. Possibly most useful for the majority of you would be the local forecast which prompts you for a postcode or town name and then provides you with a ten day forecast which includes all the usual precipitation forecast, maximum and minimum temperatures, wind speed, humidity etc.
For dates just around the corner you have the option of breaking down your local forecast into hourly predictions which is a nice touch although I am unsure quite how accurate these are.

The next section takes you to a monthly climate report which I´m sure would be of interest if you were looking to compare different country climates or seasonal changes however this wouldn´t be useful to most people. Quite a unique area of the site is the `maps´ section which shows you maps of the UK highlighting good and bad areas for air stagnation, pollen, seasonal affective disorder, sun exposure, weather related aches and pains; the list goes on.

A motoring and holiday planner are thrown in for good measure which allows you to plan your trip around missing potential bad weather patterns and select countries to visit based on your personal preference of weather conditions. Keeping on the holiday theme, the site can also show you sport related weather forecasts so if you are a seasoned skier for example then you can check out the potential conditions across the world.

Also included are a number of reports which I didn´t think many people would end up using such as the `Ultra Violet Index´ but I´ll leave you to check out Weather.com and see what you think; chances are that it will certainly come into use sooner or later so do keep it bookmarked. Also do check out the Met Office´s site as there is certainly going to be a large amount of unique content available which I have been unable to cover in this article.

Computer Articles 2007