Weather radar can change your life!

Cliff Mass' blog has this quote, regarding timing your outdoor activity using radar snapshots to forecast the arrival time of wind and rain fairly accurately.  Does anyone (Cliff, Garth, Bryan, Amar, Sky, Charlie, other lurkers or regulars?) have urls they regularly use to accomplish this?  PM me please if you are too bashful or secretive to post here!  Thanks in advance.

I don't use the data/MM5 models, since I just don't have time to become proficient with their quirks. I'd rather be skiing. I just look ~twice a day at the NWS forecast discussion , including the marine and aviation forecasts, along with the NWAC detailed discussion and avy forecast . Following trends in the discussion can give insight into the forecasters' model uncertainty. When they're sure about something, they can time frontal passages to ~1 hr precision. A word to the wise though: Even if you get good at interpreting the forecasts and exploiting short windows to get into the alpine ahead of storms, be conservative.

Sky's blog has led me to believe that he just uses the KOMO 4 method of forecasting. With the right snow intuition and occasional consultations with telemetry/high level forecasts, I suspect it works just as well, with far less wasted time.

I use the radar all the time for shorter duration outdoor activities (e.g. a several hour bike during a break in the rain), but since skiing is usually a most of the day type thing the short range of weather radar (a few hours at most for a rain cell to track from the coast to the Cascades) make it less useful. I do use a host of other weather resources for skiing:

NWAC telemetry for recent snow/weather conditions in the mountains
NWS forecast discussion (see trumpetsailor's post)

These two will get you 90% of the way there. I also routinely look at radar/satellite/model output, almost all of which you can get from either

www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/loops/ -- for satellite, radar, low resolution/large scale model output (GFS is best model)

www.atmos.washington.edu/mm5rt/ -- for high resolution, detailed model output

Go outside and if the weather "sucks" be happy because it's less crowded.

Also it's good to experience all sorts of weather in the outdoors so you can better understand what "nice" weather is.