You feeling ok Mr. Meteorologist? You might have a bug.

A virtual weather man can be in your pocket with you from east to west with a little help of new age technology and innovation.

I decided to use my personal weekend experience this week. Fittingly, my nieces were baptised this weekend down in Westminster, MD. My family and I went down for the celebration leaving around 7 a.m. Friday morning. It was gloomy, cold, and somewhat rainy.

About halfway through the trip my boyfriend said, “Hey, there is a fog warning for this part of Pennsylvania.” I asked him how he knew this since we left Albany with no extended forecast knowledge.

His T-Mobile G1 cell phone has an application, WeatherBug in which he recently downloaded, that tracks your location using a GPS system and reports the weather forecast for the area you are in.

The home page of the WeatherBug application offers general information while you can use the tabs to specifiy and filter the forecast you want.

Specifies by using a color scale exact to your location.

Using different layers can help specify the weather conditions in your exact location.

The application zooms in similar to what Google Earth does. You can even see houses from satellite images. If there were certain weather conditions, you can physically find your home and obtain exact up-to-date radar for your specific house. The map that is displayed is color coded by using  a “layering” option where you can see either specific temperature, radar, or satellite.

I am the kind of person that needs to see in order to believe things. And sure enough about ten more minutes and we were draped in the heaviest fog I have ever seen. It was as if the entire car was blanketed with a thick, heavy, white sheet and just like that had become invisible. Traveling without sight is one of the scariest ventures to take, espeically at 70-75 mph.

Needless to say, we arrived safely. We were delayed about a half an hour by the fog but made it down in due time.

Day two of the trip also had a weather update from the application, WeatherBug. In Carroll County, the surroudning areas and states had a vulnerability to a tornado. Only a watch, it still was adamint in our minds to a tornado in possible vicinity. We could have easily turned on the television but instead, the application did the work for us.

This was a great carry on to our trip and should be a handy device to be used in a lot of casual traveling. In a wireless lifestyle and the constant, almost inhumane addiciton to be connected- little additions such as the WeatherBug make it difficult to see how we ever lived without such ornaments. The levels of convience are rising as well as the integration of technology in most avenues of every day life.

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