FAQ and threads for those just starting to hike the Colorado 14ers.
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Rampaging Baloths wrote: ↑Tue Jun 03, 2025 10:59 am
NWS/NOAA is the best. Doing the point and click is good. But also reading the forecast discussion and clicking the meteogram (the hourly) is good and gives a lot of context.
The forecast discussion is essential — actual meteorologists, sometimes with decades of experience in local weather, giving their interpretation of the models’ outputs.
For high-resolution radar and lightning data during the North American Monsoon, I've found Radarscope to be the best tool (with their $10/year tier subscription that includes lightning data). It's great for evaluating incoming storms and storm tracks in realtime and making informed decisions about whether to bail below tree line. Of course this depends on having internet connectivity but that's becoming more ubiquitous in the mountains, for better or worse.
Gotta be careful with reflectivity over the mountains. There are 3 NEXRAD stations in CO. GJ, Pueblo and Denver.
All of the suffer from beam blockage from terrain and can be very high altitude over the mountains.
Lightning network is proprietary to NOAA and is run by Vaisala. But it is good for most of Earth's surface.
rmcpherson wrote: ↑Tue Jun 03, 2025 2:12 pm
For high-resolution radar and lightning data during the North American Monsoon, I've found Radarscope to be the best tool (with their $10/year tier subscription that includes lightning data). It's great for evaluating incoming storms and storm tracks in realtime and making informed decisions about whether to bail below tree line. Of course this depends on having internet connectivity but that's becoming more ubiquitous in the mountains, for better or worse.
Gotta be careful with reflectivity over the mountains. There are 3 NEXRAD stations in CO. GJ, Pueblo and Denver.
All of the suffer from beam blockage from terrain and can be very high altitude over the mountains.
Good point, although that's true for all these tools: you need to know how to use them and how to interpret the data and using them is no substitute for using your eyes and judgement. In Radarscope, you can see the estimated height of the radar beam using the distance tool. The ability to rapidly switch between available radars is a crucial feature.
