Someone from the UW's Applied Physics Department emailed Seattlest last week to point out a new weather forecasting system they're developing. It's actually a project that Applied Physics is working on with the departments of statistics, atmospheric sciences, and, interestingly, psychology, and it's of particular interest right now because, well, the rain washed away half the state in the past few days. They call it a Probcast, unfortunately, which is a mash-up of "probability" and "forecast." Maybe they should have taken it interdisciplinary for reals and involved the marketing department...

Name aside, it's really cool. We wanted to compare it to the Futurecast at KOMO (who we said yesterday, "has the best weather page in the city"), but it looks like you can't see the Futurecast without giving KOMO some money. Probcast: free. The victor is clear. It's not just that it's free, though. Probcast gives you access to detailed maps that display the probability of precipitation in a specified area. Or the probability of extreme amounts of precipitation in a specified area. Or the likely amount of precipitation. The only thing it seems to be missing is an "off" button for precipitation. Or maybe if you could click on the angry red of high precipitation probability over 98105 and drag it over to Centralia or somewhere...

Probcast also offered this critique of Seattlest's weather info:

PS When I clicked on the weather forecast link in the upper left part of the Seattlest page I got an error message.

Dude, it's a picture of a rain cloud with a little number written next to it. What more do you really need?