Links

Ha ha ha. What originality and wit. I bet nobody's ever thought of that before.

Here are some pointers to sites which I have, at some stage, found to be useful or entertaining. Although I wouldn't want to give the impression that I spend all my time looking for them ...

• Music-related.
• Climate-related.
• Mapping.
• Generally useful.

Music-related

These are links to serious music stuff; information about composers and research into classical music, and places where you can find far more comprehensive lists than I've got time to assemble:
• Onno van Rijen has assembled some impressive catalogues of works by Soviet composers, as well as extensive material on Shostakovich, and links to other related sites.
• IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in France. News about the organisation, and what's going on in contemporary music generally.

  La version francaise de cette page est ici.

• The Sibelius Music Academy in Finland (surprise surprise) maintains an extensive list of links.

Climate stuff

Various climate and weather-related links, which have to do with my main areas of research. I've subdivided this section into 2 categories: general sites, and sources of data.

General climate and weather-related sites

• Home page of the American Meteorological Society.
• The Arkansas-Red Basin River Forecast Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Includes hydrologic forecasts, precipitation products as well as data archives.
• Home page of theAustralian Meteorological Bureau. An excellent site, including an education section as well as much useful climate information.
• El Niño/Southern Oscillation Education Resources. A list of links to sites where you can find out about El Niño - varying degrees of technical detail.
• Home page of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMRWF).
• Hurricane Hot Spot. Includes current radar and satellite images for the USA, as well as details of the current season's storms. Lots of useful stuff about hurricanes here, although the site is a bit slow because of a lot of unnecessary hi-tech gimmicks.
• Home page of the Hydra project, from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Service (KNMI). An excellent source of high-quality windspeed data, among other things.
• Home page of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Group, at Columbia University. This is one of the most useful sites out there, mainly because of the impressive archive of climate data they have available (a direct link can be found below).
• The North Atlantic Oscillation page at the LDEO observatory.
• The US Tropical Cyclone Prediction Center/National Hurricane Center. Lots of stuff about cyclones and hurricanes, including forecasts, latest news and historical hurricane statistics.
• Home page of the UK Meteorological Office.
• Home page of the US National Weather Service. Can be a bit slow.
• The USDA-ARS Hydrology Laboratory. Joint page run by the US Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Service. They have a water-related data archive which is quite useful (see below).

Sources of climate data

• The Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory's Introduction to Climate Data. I think this is about the best free data archive on the web. They maintain records of monthly temperature and precipitation from stations around the globe, going back to the mid-17th century in some cases. You can also download topographic information, as well as lots of other things. It takes a while to become familiar with the front end of this site when searching for data, but it's well worth it. The `Introduction to Climate Data' page does not include all the data available from LDEO, but is a good place to start familiarising yourself with what's available. More data can be found by following links off the LDEO Climate Group home page.
• data from the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC). You need to register with BADC to use these data, and as far as I'm aware you can't use them for commercial purposes.
• The US Agricultural Research Service Water Database. Precipitation and streamflow data from small agricultural watersheds in the USA. Periods of record range from 1 to 50 years.
• FTP site from the Australian Bureau of Meterology. Quality-controlled temperature and rainfall data from Australia, going back over a century in some cases, with lots of documentation.
• Data from the African Data Dissemination Service. I have yet to investigate this one fully.
• The NOAA North-West Network Data Access Page. Mainly links to other data sources.
• Data available from the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia. A variety of things are available from here.
• CPC - Data: Current Monthly Atmospheric and SST Index Values.
• Windspeed data from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). This is the highest-quality observational windspeed data I know.
• Daily weather data from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Insititute.
• Hurricane track data from Unisys.com.

Mapping

Maps, coastline co-ordinates, find a street etc.
• The National Geophysical Data Center Coastline Extractor from Boulder, Colorado. Download coastline co-ordinates at a variety of spatial scales, and in a variety of file formats. Worldwide data are available.
• The US Geological Survey Mapping Service. Mapping information for the USA.
• UK Streetmap - search for any place in the UK and download a map.
• UK Digital Elevation Map. These data are free to the UK academic community (specifically, you need to have an Athens account, for which you're eligible if your institute has signed up). Anybody else has to pay, I believe.

General useful stuff

These are just a few sites that I personally find useful. In no particular order.
• UK Street Map. Find a London Street, or a place in the UK. Excellent site - maps are customisable, and the whole thing is very easy to use.
• EasyJet. Book ridiculously cheap plane tickets online. Again, easy to use and well-designed.
• The Universal Currency Converter
• 164 Currency Converter by OANDA