Saturday, January 11, 2025

Weather and astronomy on gocek.org

My USA Weather Page is packed with information, but I made the choice to include the kitchen sink at the expense of a quick glance at highs and lows.

A 7-day forecast can be generated for any location in the 50 states, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. Locations can be selected by town name, zip code or latitude/longitude. Many points of interest can be selected as well. For example, a forecast can be produced for the Washington Monument in Washington, CD, or Ala Wai Boat Harbor in Hawaii (that's the marina seen in the opening credits of the Gilligan's Island TV show).

Current weather observations are also shown, including weather maps and notes about the closest and strongest earthquakes within 200 miles during the previous 24 hours. Forecasts and current conditions include EPA air quality indexes.

Forecasts show predictions for every hour of the 7-day period. This includes temperatures, rain and snow amounts, wind speeds, wave heights when appropriate, and visibility. For example, visibility will be lower on a foggy day than on a clear day.

But that's not all! The sunrise and sunset times are shown along with the phase of the moon. When appropriate, the forecast will show expected equinoxes, solstices, lunar and solar eclipses, and whether a meteor shower is at its peak. For solar eclipses, the visibility of the eclipse will be partial or total or annular depending on the location of the forecast.

Data originate mainly with US government sources such as the national weather service. See the acknowledgments at the end of your forecast!

Interestingly, celestial events such as eclipses or equinoxes cannot be exactly calculated. Consider a "full moon". When looking at the moon, what we see is the illumination of the moon's surface by the sun. As the moon rotates around the earth, the part of the moon facing the earth is different than the part of the moon facing the sun. An observer on the sun would always see a full moon (except when the earth gets in the way). But an observer on the earth is looking at the moon from a different angle; part of what we see is illuminated by the sun, and part is not, so we see a crescent, or a circle, or nothing at all. A "full moon" occurs when the sun shines past the earth and illuminates the who visible portion of the moon, and the times when this occurs can be predicted. By the way, the sun is big enough that the shadow of the earth usually does not fall on the moon, but once in a while, the moon is eclipsed by the earth's shadow.

My point in the previous paragraph is that the earth and moon are constantly in motion, relative to the sun. The maximum illumination of the moon each lunar cycle only lasts for an instant. We can predict that instant, but minor perturbations in orbits and revolutions and gravity and light waves can cause our calculations to be "off" by a fraction of a second. In addition, any arithmetic measurement is finite, but that instant of max illumination is infinitely short, then the moon moves. In other words, we can only "predict" a phase of the moon. We can be accurate enough that humans can't "see" the tiny errors in our calculations or the tiny changes in illumination as time progresses.