THE end of the drought came with a bang. Not only did the recent rains throughout the province of Sindh provided the thirsty plains of Indus with much needed water, it also brought with it, untold misery. From the rural huts of Badin to the villas of Karachi, monsoon rains came too much too soon.
From the authorities to the citizens, everyone was caught off-guard as flood waters not only devastated the streets of Karachi, it also left hundreds of thousands of haris homeless. The authorities, as usual, were slow to move with little or insufficient help to offer.
Still, depending on the government altogether is something that many of us don’t engage ourselves with. And one of the resources at our disposal in this regard is the Internet. There are numerous Web sites that cater to our needs. The usual five to ten day forecast is available on a number of sites. However, finding the right info at the right time and at the right place, is indeed of critical value to all of us.
So one of the places that we started our online, journey was the official site of the Pakistan Meteorological Department. Sadly it was left wanting in more than one ways.
The Pakistan Met office may be one of the more organized and better working government departments (having correctly predicted most of the incoming rains and wet weather), but the same cannot be said about its site. In fact what is even more sorry to see is that www.met.gov.pk was once a very responsible site. However, now from the design of the site right down to the information that is available on it left the visitor dazed and frustrated.
Links on the Home Page, like the Daily Pollen Count Report of Islamabad for Print Media and Weather Report for Sindh and Balochistan, don’t work. And the design of the Home Page is so mediocre that any street wise web-page designer could have done a better job. Still, thankfully, there are a few links that do take the visitor to meaningful data. There is even a link that takes you to the experimental new-look Met office site. But even it has some code problems while downloading.
Moving away from Pakistan’s lame online presence, we come to a more international presence, for example Yahoo. As one of the premier search directories, Yahoo’s effort of excellence is further vindicated by it strong showing in the weather area. At http://weather.yahoo.com/, the web directory has global weather news. By default, it has all the weather updates of US cities. But there are links to weather updates to 15 different geographic regions of the world. Satellite images and various links, including to those related to aviation are here. With reference to Pakistan, Yahoo offers the weather updates of 22 different towns and cities of the country at http://weather.yahoo.com/regional/PKXX.html. A more straight forward search option for Yahoo surfers is the option of just feeding the word ‘weather’ and the name of your city in the search field, and you’ll be taken straight to the current weather situation of that particular city.
Same is the case with CNN which along with its vast online resources has a pretty good weather link at http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/. Just feed the name of your town and the temperature of the city and the coming five day forecast are just a click away.
However, the BBC’s offering is much better than its American counterpart. Loaded with information, not just Fahrenheit and centigrade, the site is of particular interest these days what with the blistering heat wave and scorching sunshine that the British isles and the rest of Europe have been receiving. At http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ one can find not only news about all the heat, you can also get in touch with the reasons as to why the heat is on! There is also a link to the Kyoto Protocol that answers the questions and who needs to ratify it. Weather maps and five day forecast are a norm. There is also Fact of the Day in Weatherwise, where you can update yourself with all the weather related lingo. The Features section is incredibly informative. A two part piece on the Ice Age will give you a better insight of things, hundreds of thousands of years back. There are even history lessons as to when weather played a decisive factor in major turning points in history, for example Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. BBC is certainly taking weather seriously!
At www.weatherbase.com, organizers of the site have collected, from a number of sources, comprehensive information of 16,439 cities worldwide, that is by far the most easy-to-use, relevant, comprehensive source on the Internet. Historical records of Karachi and thousands of other cities are available here on this link. Curious about the average snowfall in October in Aspen? Want to know if you’ll have good beach weather in March in Crete? Wondering about the average temperature in October in Perth? You’ll find it here.
But away from the serious stuff and for all of you who are interested in the extremes of record keeping, then Extreme Weather Records is for you. At http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/extreme/html_docs/Weather.html you’ll find the driest as well as the wettest places on Earth. This a fun link for all of you trivia buffs who just can’t get enough.
All that is happening here on dear old Earth is quite different from what is happening outside, in outer space. And as the name indicates, http://www.spaceweather.com/ is about Solar Winds, X-Ray Flares and Meteor Showers. Even the big celestial event of the year has a special place on this site. On August 27th, Earth and Mars will be closer together than they have been in some 60,000 years. With the help of the link here you can find Mars in the sky and position your telescope to find that fourth rock from the Sun. But just in case if you don’t have one, then you can log onto this site and have a look at what people are viewing from their telescopes.
THE end of the drought came with a bang. Not only did the recent rains throughout the province of Sindh provided the thirsty plains of Indus with much needed water, it also brought with it, untold misery. From the rural huts of Badin to the villas of Karachi, monsoon rains came too much too soon.
