The forecast at your fingertips...

Call for the weather in the morning, and you'll get a forecast for the greater Boston area--even as far away as Cape Cod.

But that won't tell you exactly what the weather will be like when you walk from your 11 a.m. seminar in Sever to your noon lecture in Science Center C.

"The weather on campus is often different than it is around campus," says Franklin M. Steen, director of the Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS). "[It's] a local phenomena."

Now, with the creation of a new World Wide Web site, students can obtain accurate, up-to-the-minute weather forecasts for the Harvard campus straight from their dorm rooms.

The Web site takes advantage of Harvard's own weather station, created by a team of Science Center staff and located on top of the eighth floor of the Science Center.

Every two minutes, the weather data from the Science Center is transferred to the Web page, designed by Matthew J. Paschke '96, one of the project members.

Paschke says he used macros and a screen-capture utility to program the 486-based computer to continually process weather data and display the results.

"The biggest technical hurdle," Paschke says, "was to make [the computer] always reliably update...without crashing or running out of memory."

Any student with a computer connected to Harvard's network can view current weather forecasts and conditions. The site can be accessed at http://weather.fas.harvard.edu.

"It's like everybody has a weather station right in their room, and you can access it," Steen says.

The Web page displays the current temperature, wind speed and direction, precipitation levels and barometric pressure.

The Web site also provides summaries of recent weather conditions, and has several links to other sites, including the National Weather Service, which provide further weather information.

The idea for the Web site originated with Steen, who had taken part in a similar project at Yale, where it captured wide interest from the student body. The Yale project served as an inspiration for Harvard's station.

"[But] this is much better," Steen says, referring to the Harvard site's greater automation and accessibility.

Most of the work on the project was done last year when Paschke, Steen and Andrew Paulson of FAS Computer Services first decided to carry out the idea.

Paulson arranged the purchasing of the hardware for the weather station, called the Experimentor, from a company called Fascinating Electronics.

The hardware set up on the roof of the Science Center includes an anemometer, a thermometer, a wind vane, a barometer, a rain gauge and a hydrometer.

Several Science Center staff members helped set up and calibrate the instruments on the roof, as well as connect them to a computer in the basement via an interface box and cables, Paschke says.

Designed to be fully automatic, the project should require a minimal amount of maintenance, says Paschke, who was also involved in creating the hypertext map of Harvard for the FAS Web site.

The final step involving the network connection that makes the Web page accessible over the Internet was not made until this year, Steen says, because of the large number of other network-related tasks that required attention on campus.

In addition to being displayed on the Web page, the collected weather data may be used to study local weather patterns and trends.

But Steen says scientific research on Harvard weather patterns may require the use of better and more sophisticated instruments. He says he does not think anyone is currently using the data for research.

"At the moment, we just put it up as a convenience to the Harvard community," Paschke says.

Although the Web page became accessible just last week, a few students already say they plan to utilize it.

"[I'll] probably check it every day," Baratunde R. Thurston '99 says. "When I check my e-mail in the morning, I'll check the weather too."

Jeffrey I. Zaref '96 says he found the outside resources linked to the Web page to be useful as well.

"[I] liked the links...where you can see weather maps of the entire nation, like you see on TV where they have fronts and clouds and stuff like that," he says.