Passing Up Tomorrow

I work with the weather forecast day by day when it comes to geo photo cataloging the Road Fork and Whipple Sections of the Buckeye Trail (North Country concurrent). For those of you just tuning in, those sections are in SE Ohio, generally east of I-77 and south of I-70 in Ohio. That's one reason why I like to call this region "Far SE Ohio." 

I lead Adventurer's Project, which is an effort to try and create a new chapter of the Buckeye Trail Association. It supports these sections and this project is a part of our data collection, which could help in multiple ways.

But getting back to the weather, my camera devices can embed the coordinates of where the pictures are taken. But because these aren't being done with stronger, professional grade equipment, the conditions in the sky have to be good for a more accurate position.

I watch Weatherbug for skies predicted to be "partly sunny" or better.  Tomorrow, we're expected to get lightning on the Road Fork Section, but the forecast for the Whipple Section reads sunny and hot. Unfortunately, my van is fuel inefficient, old and the Whipple Section is about a hour away. I'll have to overnight, but my tent needs repairs.  I'm afraid I'll have to pass tomorrow up.

Log 2014051201

I drove my car down to the Cuyahoga National Forest today to acquire a free map at Happy Days Camp.  On my way back, I stopped at a local gas station and just before I got out of the car, the emergency sound played on my smartphone Weatherbug Elite app, alerting me that I was in an area declared to be in a tornado warning.  The gas station clerks quickly shut down the station and reluctantly, I had to drive another 3 miles in to the nearby City of Hudson.  I stopped at a local McDonald's to prepare to take shelter.

The point that I want to make is that I was rather impressed with the way that app worked under the circumstances.  My AM/FM head unit wasn't on at the time.  Also, I got emergency text alerts from Verizon Wireless as well.  Weatherbug played the emergency weather sound again when the app changed over to another county.  That's something that the text alerts didn't do, but they probably work on a much wider area, whereas, the app goes from the nearest weather station to the next one based on my GPS position.

They are probably more frequent, but I'm not sure if that makes the text alerts inferior?  Right now, I'm going to reserve judgment on that.  Weatherbug is inferior to the text in the way that I won't get its updates if I don't have any data signal.  But the texts will come in if I have so much as one unstable bar of roaming.  As for today, it's good to see this get a test.  It wasn't even on my list of things to experiment with and I'm glad it happened.

My back sprain continues to become more minor