MIKE MOSS SAYS:       Fran,    There is a link to "WRAL's Complete Coverage of 2007-08 Drought" on our main weather page that will take you to all of the drought-related information.

MIKE MOSS SAYS:      Lisa,      I can't think of a weather camp as such, but you might be able to arrange a tour of the National Weather Service Office in Raleigh (see their site at http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/rah/ where you will find both a "virtual tour" and a tour request link toward the bottom left of the page), and as far as our station there is a tour request link under the FAQ section of the "WRAL" area of the web site.

Otherwise, there are dozens of great weather-related web sites. Some of the more general that focus on education and a nice overview of the field include

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream//

and

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/home.rxml

Some good information on meteorology as a career is available through the American Meteorological Society at

http://www.ametsoc.org/AtmosCareers/index.html

Finally, a visit to the library should turn up any

MIKE MOSS SAYS:      J,      Not many good options there! If you absolutely have no way to get to more substantial shelter, the least bad choice is probably to pull up onto the island and stay as low to the ground as you reasonably can, and to maintain some distance and separation between members of your group so that if a strike occurs, everyone isn't hit at the same time and there is someone left to provide first aid, call for help via marine radio or cell phone, etc. If you stay in the boat, try to keep your body as low as possible in hopes that a strike would hit the boat and pass through or over the hull and into the water. One problem with the boat is that it would be difficult to put any significant space between the people on board. In fact, I remember a case when I was living in Panama City FL in which both people on board a small open boat were killed by a single strike. Of course, if the storm happened to produce severe wind

MIKE MOSS SAYS:      James,     You can find some of those readings by using the "Carolina's Coast" link from our "Recreational Forecasts" page. Another source that sometimes has surf temperature reports from more sites in that area is the Surf Zone forecast from the Morehead City National Weather Service office. You can find that report at

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=MHX&product=SRF

You can also use the adress below to query current and recent data listings from coastal buoy stations, including Duck and Oregon Inlet

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/maps/NorthCarolina.shtml

MIKE MOSS SAYS: Glenn, For many years, human observers estimated visibility based on how well a series of objects or lights of known distance could be seen, and related these distances to a reference map of the area that showed how far away these objects (towers, buildings, hilltops, bridges, etc) were known to be. Most airports now rely on automated weather systems that include a "forward scatter sensor." This instrument produces pulsed flashes of blue light, some of which is scattered at an angle toward a nearby detector. Visibility is estimated from the intensity of scattered light, which increases when there are more fog droplets, smoke or haze particles, raindrops or snowflakes in the beam. These sensors report a visibility based on one minute samples averaged over the past ten minutes leading up to each observation.

As it relates to your question then, the current method of obtaining visibilities for most locations is based on the "particle