About Big Bend Weather...Our Site, Instruments, Data & History

Big Bend Weather (BBW) • A privately owned and operated, non-commercial, environmental monitoring and weather data provider. Our instruments are located approximately 1 mile north of the Terlingua Ranch Airport-1E2 at an elevation of 3510 ft., Brewster County, Texas. We take great pride in providing the most timely, accurate and reliable weather data in the Big Bend Region. All our data can be freely viewed in real-time on our website, www.bigbendweather.com. Additionally, our meteorological data is shared through several affiliates and can be viewed at the following sites: NOAA - National Weather Service, Meso-West, Mid-South Weather Network and Weather Underground. Our lightning data is sent to the StrikeStar Network and then displayed on Weather Underground.

www.BigBendWeather.com • Our website displays all our meteorological data including real time current conditions, air quality, UV & Solar Radiation levels, UV Forecasts and weather forecasts for multiple locations in the Big Bend Region. Our “Live View” HD web cam provides a view of the sky and weather over the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend national Park, with options to view daily time lapses from the past 30 days. Users can download both still images and Time Lapse videos directly from the interface.  We also publish our historical data which is available in formatted reports including Trends, Records and Stats, Wind Data Plots & graphs along with monthly and daily reports. For the aviation enthusiast, we have multiple pages showing real time aircraft tracking and we are a Flight Radar and Flight Aware ADS-B tracking station.

Instruments and Lab • We utilize professional grade meteorological equipment from RainWise Inc., Davis Instruments, Boltek and Nielsen-Kellerman and more. Specialized hardware and software collect data from our instruments where it is formatted and streamed to our off-premises server. We strive to stay online during the most severe storms and power outages by utilizing extended battery back-up systems along with a back-up generator. Our off-site server is connected to 3 major Internet backbone providers, housed in a hardened facility and with greater than 99.99% up-time.

Quality of Service • BBW strives to provide data from our instruments in real time and as accurately as possible. We use professional class instruments from multiple manufacturers. By maintaining redundant meteorological instruments, we can service and calibrate while staying online with our current conditions. All instruments are routinely calibrated using reference instruments which are calibrated against a NIST traceable standard. From the moment our sensors take measurements to the time it appears on our web site is typically 2 - 3 seconds. Depending on your Internet connection, data will be refreshed every 8 seconds and our storm tracker has an average stale time of 4-5 seconds.

Community Area • BBW is dynamic, interactive site, with customizable web apps, user forums and much more. Photo and Video galleries, community calendar, discussion forums with built in Social Integration and “the weather geek’s blog”. BBW also supports CoCoRaHS and we display a map of precipitation reports from all members in the Big Bend Region.

Geoscience • We have an Astronomy section (New) and 4 different Earthquake maps showing activity during the past 7 days, from 375 mile to a 5K mile radius. Our Fire Weather area includes a “Fire Potential map and also a current wildfire map. The Hydrology section shows current river levels along the Rio Grand in the Big Bend Region.

Our History • We have been providing weather data for SE Texas since 1997 through our website (Katy Weather).  In 2003,with our affiliation with MesoWest, our data undergoes a quality check and is then published on the NWS web site. In 2004 we added a lightning detection/Storm Tracker system and shared our data with the StrikeStar network, which provides lightning data for Weather Underground.
2010 was our permanent move to Big Bend country and we acquired the BigBendWeather,com domain. We hope you enjoy our site and would love to hear from you with any comments or suggestions.