Friends,
I’m afraid I need to Pause the ‘daily forecasts’ section of RVWeather for a few weeks, possibly until September.
No reliable connectivity…
The immediate reason is a sudden lack of internet connectivity at our Gros Ventre campground in the southern portion of Grand Teton National Park. For the first five weeks of our stay here connectivity was generally good, if a bit frustrating at times. However, for the past four or five days our connectivity has decreased to only text messages and very simple (no graphics) emails or web posts.
As you can imagine, running a weather site takes a fair amount of data. What used to take me a few minutes to download is now taking hours, and uploading graphics, let alone animations or high-resolution files, has become all but impossible.
On top of the full-time job I have this summer for the Park Service, this is simply not sustainable. If we were just traveling around the country, the solution would be very simple: use our Airstream’s wheels and move to a location where there is good connectivity! Unfortunately that is not possible with my current job situation – and so we are at the mercy of Verizon, AT&T and the other cell providers, at least for this year.
There were supposed to have been improvements this year at our location: new cell towers were installed, many promises made, etc. etc. But the bottom line is connectivity this year is even worse than last. I am hopeful 2022 will be better — either increased capacity through the legacy carriers, Elon Musk’s “Starlink” program or perhaps some other solution. It will be a good winter project.
Another reason too…
Even if connectivity had not disintegrated, I may still have paused the forecasts this summer. I’ve been putting out a daily forecast 7 days/week since November — and at some point I need a break. There’s no assistant forecaster 🙂 or anyone else doing the work. While we’re in relatively quiet weather conditions, it’s a good time to rest up and recharge. The heart of hurricane season will be upon us soon enough and from there we go right into challenging winter conditions and routing.
What will keep going…
Most importantly, the RV Weather page of National Weather Service Watches Warnings and Advisories will continue to update. As bandwidth permits, I’ll continue to do RV Routings upon request. I’ll post (again, assuming I have the bandwidth) on any hurricanes or tropical storms that threaten the Gulf or East Coasts.
If bandwidth and connectivity return, I’ll continue to post the 2-day animations of forecast weather radar, wind gusts, temperature and total rainfall — they do not take much time when the comms are reliable.
Thanks for your understanding!
I’ll be back with regular daily forecast updates in a few weeks — until then, safe travels!
Enjoy The Pause. We’ll be there in July. We hope to meet up.
Thanks! Let us know when you’re here — we’re staying in the Gros Ventre campground for the summer.
We could only get 2 nights at Colter Bay. I keep checking.
It’s a great location! Both the RV Park (FHU) and the Campground (dry or electric only) are good.