MesoWest User's Guide Introduction to MesoWest  MesoWest was created to provide access to current weather observations in the western United States. It is used by the National Weather Service to aide in forecasting, used extensively by researchers to understand severe weather events such as winter snow storms and damaging winds, and is available to the public for personal use. MesoWest relies upon weather observing networks that are managed by federal, state, and local agencies and private firms. Additional stations have been installed at key locations such as near the Great Salt Lake and at venue sites for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in the Wasatch Mountains. Weather observations of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation, and other weather variables are available at thousands of locations across the United States. MesoWest also uses GoogleEarth to provide a graphical interface to place observations in a surface weather map. This allows the user to get a better overall view of the conditions in a certain location or region. MesoWest also provides different layers that can be placed over the GoogleEarth map which include NEXRAD radar and accumulated precipitation images, color shaded temperature, dewpoint, and wind speed contours, NWS watches/warnings, active fire perimeters, hot spots, and smoke plumes. You will learn how to access all the data and resources that MesoWest provides in the following tutorial. MesoWest Main Page The MesoWest home page includes quick access to station data through searching for stations by several different methods (zip code, station ID, address, or lat/lon) in the drop down menu at the left. You can also click on the map in the center to bring up the Google Earth Interface to look for stations visually. 
At the middle left is the login area for My MesoWest. If you do not already have an account with us then the first thing that you're going to want to do is create a new user. To do this, click on the 'Create a User' link just below the login area. Once you have completed the registration process and have verified your account you will see the following page for your new profile: 
On the left half of the page is where all your personal saved profile maps would go. The other half of the page are links to different features of MyMesowest which includes those of example saved profiles, which we will look at later. MesoWest Surface Weather Maps Next, click on the link 'Surface Weather Maps' which is located on the right hand side of the page under the 'My MesoWest Enabled Products'. Once you have done that a google map centered on Utah will pop up, as follows: 
This is the surface weather maps page, where weather station data is overlayed on a google map. To bring up the individual stations, click on the red 'Map It' button on the left hand side. After loading, wind barbs with a white highlighted number will show up in the locations of weather stations. The number that shows up is the latest recorded temperature. When first loaded, the surface map will default to Utah and only show stations within the state of Utah. This can be changed two ways, through selecting a region/zone or by radius. These can be found under the 'Data Selection' tab on the left hand side of the page. 
Using the Region/Zone drop down menu, you can switch between all U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and different NWS zones and show all reporting stations within the area. Using the radius drop down menu, you can select a radius and show all reporting stations that are within the radius from a point that you click on the map. There can be a total of two overlays that can be displayed by the station icon. These can be changed by using the drop down menues on the left hand side under the 'Display' tab. 
Here is an example of station KSLC, the Salt Lake Airport, with temperature and wind speed displayed: 
Play around with the different station overlays until you are comfortable and then move on to the next part of the tutorial. Surface Weather Map Layers A unique feature that MesoWest has, is the ability to display different layers over the surface weather map. Available layers include NEXRAD radar, color coded temperature, dewpoint, wind speed, precipitation, and more. To acess this feature, click the 'Layer Options' link under the 'Other Features' tab on the left hand side of the page. 
Doing this will bring up the following menu: 
You can choose as many layers as you want to overlay on top of the surface weather map, but they all won't be visable at once. Play around with this feature until you are comfortable with it. Here is an example of a map with the Precipitation (in) and US NEXRAD radar layers overlayed with 6hr precip highlighted for each reporting station in the area: 
Another feature that is included in MesoWest is the fire layers. There are three layers that can be overlayed which are NEDIS detected fire hotspots, smoke, and GEOMAC fire perimeters. This feature can be accessed by clicking this link:  which is
at the top left of the surface maps page. This menu will then pop up:
The Geomac Fire Perimeter displays the boundaries of large active fires. The NEDIS smoke overlay displays the location and intensity of sattelite detected smoke plumes from fires on top of the surface weather map. The NEDIS Fire overlay displays sattelite detected hot spots. In the bottom half of the menu you can scroll trough the different fire regions and click on a particular fire which will bring up a surface weather map cenetred on that fire. Below is an example of a surface weather map using the fire overlays: 
One important option that has not been mentioned yet is the 'Roads on Top' option in the 'Layer Options' menu. Because the color shaded layers like temperature and smoke will hide the google maps, using the 'Roads on Top' option will ensure you know where you are in the map. Below is an example of this option turned off (left) and turned on (right):  
Accessing Past Data MesoWest also has archived data which goes back to 1997. You can access this data by clicking the 'Time Options' link underneath the 'Other Features' tab on the left hand side of the page:
Doing this brings up the following menu: 
Changing the time will change the time of the data by the wind barb icons as well as any layers you have displayed on the map. The instructions at the bottom of the menu explain the different options here. Read them and then play around with the time features until you are comfortable with them. Saving Profiles A feature of MyMesoWest is the ability to save a particular surface weather map for future use. You can save historical weather maps so that when you access the saved map it will bring up the conditions for the time you specified. You can also save a map that will bring up current conditions every time you access it. To begin first create a map that is of interest to you. There are numerous examples of saved profiles in the bottom right of your MyMesoWest home page, under the 'Other Profile Examples' tab. Look through those examples then go ahead and create your own. Remember, if you want to bring up past weather data on the surface weather map, un-check the 'Auto Current Time' box in the 'Time Options' menu: 
and then enter in the date you are looking for. Once you are satisified with your map, save it by clicking the 'Save Profile Link'  on the top right of the surface weather page.
Doing this will bring up the following window:
Here you can enter in what you want to name your profile, describe what the profile is showing, and can choose if you want to share it with others. Scroll down and you will see the settings of the map you just saved. These are the settings that the map will automatically be set at every time you load it. Look through it and make sure every thing is correct before saving. The setting that you will want to look for most of the time is the time setting. If you have a map that shows historical condtions, make sure the setting 'Starting at Time:' is set to the date you want. If the map you have is a current conditons map the setting should say 'Current Time'. For reference, I made a map called Wasatch Front that brings up the current conditions for the Wasatch Front. Here are the current settings: 
After saving, you can go to your MyMesoWest home page and find your profile there. It will look like the following: 
MesoWest Test To see how well you can navigate and use the different features of MesoWest, use the MesoWest surface map feature to answer the following questions:
Return to top  MesoWest Department of Meteorology Copyright © 2006 University of Utah.
All Rights Reserved. |
For Questions or Comments about this page or MesoWest contact meteo-mesowest@lists.utah.edu |