A weather link directory is a classified catalog, not a blogroll. The product is the category scheme: official warnings, climate archives, observing practice, satellite and model products, station networks, and software documentation. A visitor should be able to open the hub, see the classes, and reach a primary publisher without scrolling through unlabeled bookmarks. How a station page chooses a short scientific list is a different job. How those URLs are checked for rot is a third job.
The historical TNET Weather URL /weatherlinks is treated here as that hub. The original interactive directory is not rehosted. This page keeps the address and defines the taxonomy a PWS directory should use. Editorial inclusion rules live at /weather-links.php. Operational maintenance lives at /weatherlinks.php. A notebook-style bibliography method lives at /weather-notebook.php.
Historical context
Station operators accumulated two kinds of “links” pages. One sat in the dashboard chrome and pointed at a handful of resources the Mesa-era site used that week. Another was a longer directory: tropical pages, satellite galleries, peer stations, forums. Incoming links to /weatherlinks without a .php suffix match a directory root. A stub that only said the old tool was gone wasted that root. A hub that reprints a 2005 webring would waste it in a different way: it would freeze dead hosts as if they were still categories.
The hub’s durable content is the classification. Individual URLs inside a category will move. The category names should not.
Scope of a station directory
A personal-station directory is not a national meteorological library. It exists so visitors and the operator can reach the publishers that interpret or complement this class of site. Write a scope sentence at the top:
This directory classifies public scientific and operational weather resources that a personal station site may point to. It is not NWS, not NCEI, and not a warning service.
Geography is part of scope. A U.S. desert station needs the local Weather Forecast Office, NCEI normals, and WMO methods. It does not need every WFO in the country and does not need a tropical-webring aesthetic unless the audience is actually using NHC products. A coastal Atlantic site adds NHC as a first-class category, not as decoration.
Cap the public hub. A working directory is tens of records in a handful of classes, not hundreds of undifferentiated URLs. If a class grows past what you can review, split a child page or delete the weakest entries. A hub you cannot maintain is a parked page with extra HTML.
The category scheme
Each category below is an H2 on the hub, a one-sentence role, and a small set of primary publishers. Secondary hosts belong only when they are still the issuing organization’s current public surface.
Official forecasts and hazards
Role: live watches, warnings, and the forecast that covers the instruments.
Primary: National Weather Service, the local forecast office for the station’s location, and NWS radar if imagery is in scope. For tropical basins NHC covers, National Hurricane Center.
This class is always first. A directory that leads with peer stations or forums has already inverted authority.
Climate archives
Role: normals, official station histories, and archival datasets a PWS must not impersonate.
Primary: NOAA NCEI. Regional climate centers and NWS climate pages may appear as secondary when they are the office product for that region.
A backyard yearly rainfall total does not belong in this class. It belongs on the station’s own climate tables, labeled as station HTML.
Observing practice and definitions
Role: what a measurement is, how instruments should be sited, what a unit means.
Primary: WMO and the Guide to Instruments and Methods of Observation (WMO-No. 8). NWS glossary and training pages for U.S. operational definitions (including products such as probability of precipitation).
This class is where a directory earns the right to exist next to a FAQ. The FAQ answers visitor questions; this class points at the definitions the answers rest on.
Satellite and numerical guidance
Role: remotely sensed imagery and model fields, named as such.
Primary: NOAA satellite and model surfaces that still exist as office products—for example NESDIS/GOES access pages and NCEP model pages the operator actually uses. Name the sensor or model in the link text. A GFS chart is a forecast field. A GOES frame is a remote-sensing snapshot. Neither is the backyard logger.
Do not create a “global eye candy” class. That class is how unlabeled galleries enter a scientific hub.
Station networks and identifiers
Role: public descriptions of citizen and mesonets so a station ID is interpretable.
Primary: NOAA MADIS / CWOP documentation and the network’s own current public page. List a network only if the hub’s audience needs to decode an identifier or understand quality-flag feedback. Do not turn this class into a recruitment banner.
Peer PWS homepages, if included at all, are a subclass with a blunt label: Commentary — other personal stations. They are not networks.
Station software documentation
Role: vendor manuals and description files for the publisher that writes the site’s files.
Primary: the current official Weather Display, Cumulus, or other vendor documentation for the build in use. Version the link in the annotation when you can. Software docs do not govern climate normals.
Methods notebooks and this site
Role: TNET legacy methods that explain templates, files, and interpretation.
Primary: the weather-station hub, how the service works, and data sources, quality controls, and methodology. Label these as TNET pages. They are not NWS products.
How to present each class
On the hub page, each class gets:
- the role sentence;
- three to eight links, each labeled with publisher and product;
- a note when a product is live (hazards) versus dated (normals set, Tropical Cyclone Report);
- no logos;
- no “suggested broadband” theater.
Order inside a class is authority first, then the local office, then optional extras. Alphabetizing NWS next to a hobby tracker is how visual rank collapses.
The hub may link to the station-page curation essay with an explicit sentence: the hub is the catalog; that essay is the rule for what may be copied onto a dashboard. It may link to directory maintenance for check cadence. It should not paste either essay.
What the hub is not
It is not a live search. It is not a feed of trending storms. It is not a place to restore recovered URLs that now park, advertise, or redirect to unrelated hosts. It is not a second FAQ. It is not a bibliography spreadsheet; notebooks may keep richer catalog fields (checked date, status) while the public hub shows only live, labeled entries.
If a class has no live primary publisher you are willing to stand behind, omit the class until it does. An empty heading with “coming soon” is worse than absence.
Practical checklist
- Put a scope sentence and a not-a-warning-service line at the top.
- Use a stable category list; do not invent a new heading for every bookmark.
- Lead with official forecasts and hazards.
- Keep climate archives separate from the station’s own totals.
- Name models and satellites as models and satellites.
- Label peer stations as commentary if they appear at all.
- Cap each class so it can be reviewed.
- Point curation policy and rot maintenance to their own URLs.
- Review geography when the station moves or the audience changes.
- Send life-safety users to NWS, not deeper into the hub.
Modern relevance
Classification is how a directory remains scientific after individual links move. Research libraries do the same work at a different scale: sources in one place, methods in another, no claim that a research note is an issuing-office product. TNET’s public version of that split is data sources, quality controls, and methodology.
Related: station section landing, weather-station hub, scientific station FAQ.
Sources
- National Weather Service: weather.gov
- NWS Radar: radar.weather.gov
- National Hurricane Center: nhc.noaa.gov
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information: ncei.noaa.gov
- World Meteorological Organization: wmo.int
- WMO, Guide to Instruments and Methods of Observation (WMO-No. 8): library.wmo.int
- NOAA MADIS, CWOP
- TNET, Weather station hub
- TNET, Data sources, quality controls, and methodology
- TNET, How the service works