Studying the weather is always an exciting topic in school, because you just have to look out the nearest window to see it.  But what if you want to take a look at the weather 100 miles away?  Or in the next state?  How about the entire continental United States all at once?  A quick visit to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather.gov site will provide you with a vast array of weather information that are excellent additions to units on the weather and weather forecasting.

But, let’s say you want to really impress your students with a massive, detailed overview of the weather in the United States.  Take a look at the full-resolution version of the National Mosaic Enhanced Radar Image for the United States.  This is a 3400 x 1700 pixel, animated loop of the weather radars covering the entire country.  This image would look great on a SMARTBoard or other interactive whiteboard (note: it’s probably still too high a resolution to fit entirely on the board).  Another nice feature is that clicking on a portion of the image will take you to an image for just that region.

The bad news is that it’s somewhat difficult to capture any of these weather radar images for later display.  The easiest way is using a screen capture program, like Jing, OS X’s built-in Grab, or even the old Control+Print Screen to capture to the clipboard of a Windows PC.

All of this information is free to use with no registration.  You’ll just need a computer with a broadband internet connection and a modern web browser.