this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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ShowerThoughts

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Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.

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Google Maps or Apple Maps, they work the same way. With your permission, they detect your location and speed and collect all the information and can tell people relatively accurate traffic conditions.

So why does Weather go online to ask the temperature when you’re outside and it could just measure the actual temperature, collate all the data, and tell people the temperature it actually is?

Aside from the fact that most phones can’t tell the temperature around them. I mean if they could.

I’m starting to believe the authorities are lying to us about the heat. My car can tell me the temperature, and it’s usually like 5°F hotter than my phone says.

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Prog charts, or prognostic charts, are these:

Large scale picture of what the weather is doing including the positions of pressure systems, fronts etc. You've probably seen some of the symbology used on television weather reports. Prog charts are often prepared as observations and as forecasts.

Geostationary Orbital Environmental Satellites are a series of weather satellites operated by the United States that sit up there in geosynchronous orbit and take pictures of the Earth's atmosphere at various wavelengths, providing up to date gods-eye view of the weather a hemisphere at a time.

When I went to flight school, a lot of weather data, both observations and forecasts, were delivered to pilots in a heavily abbreviated text format intended to be distributed by Morse code or teletype. Pilots would get these products either through a Direct User Access Terminal System, or have them read to them during a briefing from a Flight Service Station. Here in the age of the internet, a lot of that has been replaced with internet-based graphical data, and they want to mix things together in strange ways, while making it more difficult to access raw data like GOES images and dopplar radar images.