Living in New England, and working far from home, predicting winter weather is very important. It really sucks to have an hour commute home turn into a three-hour drive because of a snow storm. At Tabblo, we used to have a weather fanatic who would give us detailed forecasts and help us avoid the bad days. Without him, we have to do our own predictions, and we’re still learning the ropes. We almost got into a freezing rain situation yesterday which luckily didn’t materialize.

If you think weather.com has detailed reports, you need to take the red pill and see how far the rabbit hole goes. The National Weather Service has incredibly detailed hour-by-hour charts for your zip code. Navigating is a bit rough though: enter your zip code in the box on the left, you get to a page about the area. Near the bottom right is an Hourly Weather Graph link. You should get to a page that looks like this one for Marlborough MA.

It was this graph that convinced me yesterday that although it was going to be close, the rain wouldn’t actually freeze, and it didn’t, it was an uneventful drive home. Thanks federal tax dollars!