November 9^th 2006

MeteoSchweiz - the Swiss weather service

The Swiss weather service supplies for the motorbike traveler traveling in alpine regions, the most up-to-date weather informations.

The most important information options to choose are:

• A radar picture, which is built upon five weather radar stations in Switzerland that show rain- and snow-couds and is updated once an hour.
• An Isobaric map that is udated all 12 hrs and shows whole Europe.
• A satellite picture that is updated all 6 hrs.

It is worth the investment to buy an old laptop and use your cellular phone to uplink to the internet. In the meanwhile you have on any pass road full cellular coverage in many areas with GPRS bandwith. This enables you to check the weather conditions with MeteoSwiss frequently, since the weather in the Alps may change within hours.

The picture on the left shows the radar picture from the MeteoSwiss website. Blue means that there is less humidity or rain, green and yellow means low rain and red is heavy rain. On this picture we would recommend to travel to the Valais county and Lake geneva, since these areas are free of clouds.

This picture viewed as first each morning is the basic for you tour planning.