Coming from Melbourne, real weather extremes are somewhat new for me to deal with living here. I absolutely love being able to feel actual seasonal changes and part of the beauty of moving here was the chance to experience four real seasons. I feel I am so lucky to be able to fully experience the beauty of spring, amaze in the colors of autumn, swelter through a summer with no cool changes and freeze away in winter. No matter what people say about Melbourne weather it is very much the same day in day out. I still can’t believe I actually wore a coat and scarf in Melbourne during winter and I also cannot believe I thought that Melbourne humidity was humid! Seasons are exciting when you see how mother nature really works. Here, you have to prepare for the seasons and actually have clothes that are ‘for winter’ and clothes that are ‘for summer’. This year was the first year I actually packed away my summer skirts and short sleeved tops. They just don’t come back out until May/June and my wardrobe space is at a premium here.
I am not going to lie, I find all of these weather extremes pretty exciting. I annoy Bill SO much with my constant need to follow the Weather Channel and all of my storm alert emails. But it works. We were able to skip this blizzard, when the tornado came through Brooklyn in September I was able to stay at work and be safe during that, I never get caught having to buy umbrellas or gloves – it all has a purpose! I know many people laugh at the craziness that weather is reported here but I have found with my setup I can avoid the clutter of weather news and stick to what is proper reporting.
The way I keep track of all of this is –
* I always listen to 1010WINS on the radio. They have weather every ten minutes and also breaking news almost immediately.
* A fabulous shower radio. We have this one and it is awesome because not only is it a radio but it is also a weather radio so we get the National Weather Service warnings continually.
* On email, I subscribe to the Accuweather alerts – they basically just send the text of the NWS alerts but I found their service better. These emails come through very quickly and I find that is how I always find out what is happening first. I also get the MTA alerts as well for train service.
* On Twitter I follow –
– The Weather Channel.
– Local NYC news outlets.
– All of the individual subway lines I travel on for service alerts .
* On my iPhone, I use the Accuweather and Weather Channel applications. Hourly forecasts are my best friend as a forecast at 7.30am can change drastically by 2pm.
* In the mornings, I always watch some of Fox 5 Good Day New York because I find Mike Woods to be especially good with the weather reporting and they have not let me down yet. Then there is always The Weather Channel as well and I especially watch them at night when we have storm predictions.
* For websites, I always use Accuweather and The Weather Channel and also the NYC Metro Weather forums. It was the storm tracking of the users on that site that made me realize how big this storm was going to be.
My little system works a treat and means that wherever I am, I know almost immediately what is going on. This weekend was a perfect example. We weren’t sitting around watching TV or on the computer. Also, Albany news was not doing early reporting of the predicted storm because their area was not going to be greatly affected. If I didn’t have my alerts set up, we could have gone through not knowing what was going to happen. With my system in place, we were able to find out about the storm and plan accordingly so we didn’t get stuck. Yay!