Being able to forecast the weather is important in planning construction activities. There are numerous regional and national sites on the Internet that feature weather forecasting. One of these is accuweather.com, which can be accessed directly by paying a yearly subscription fee (personal = $40, corporate = $200) or free of charge by accessing it through the ABC Web pages (www.abc.org). Here is the access path: ABC home page –> Virtual Reference Library –> General References –> Almanacs of Facts & Figures –> Weather. Click on Today’s Weather and type in a city or state.
Accuweather.com enables the contractor to obtain an eight-day or 15-day forecast of any city in the country, with a weather scenario for each of the days. He can also look at current conditions or view hourly forecasts for the next eight hours (or review conditions for the past eight hours), reviewing such data as temp, percent cloud cover, precipitation, relative humidity, dew point, wind mph, and wind direction. The contractor can also retrieve historical weather data for a particular region, looking at weather averages and records.
The road maps that can be viewed and printed out from the Avis Corporation’s Web pages (www.avis.com) can be tailored to the contractor’s needs. The Avis map system can be accessed through the ABC site (ABC Home Page –> Virtual Reference Library –> General References –> Atlas of the World –> City Maps –> Avis Maps) or directly through the Avis home page. Starting with a map of the US, a contractor can first click on a particular state, then zoom in on any particular city or town (a city or town street map is displayed along with current weather conditions there), and finally zoom in on a particular neighborhood. A contractor can input a specific address, and the computer will display a map of that particular neighborhood. A neighborhood map displays the names of streets, parks, golf courses, and water bodies, but no structures are shown.
