I am the program chair for the Las Vegas Writers Group and this week’s wild Pacific storm afforded me a perfect chance to brush up on my web sleuthing skills as I sought to keep myself apprised of road conditions between Orange County and Clark County. The scheduled speaker for the January event was Chris Epting and he was planning on driving from his home in Huntington Beach to Las Vegas on Thursday in time for his speaking engagement and then drive home on Friday. The wild weather brought by the ferocious Pacific winter storm threatened to derail those carefully laid plans. I’ll cut to the chase here and confirm that, alas, Chris was unable to travel to Las Vegas this time.

One of those spectacular tornadoes seen on the TV news touched down very close to his house and flooding issues effectively prevented him from even beginning the drive.

But as we worked together to formulate a reasonable driving plan, I used a number of public web resources and I thought you might find this list helpful the next time you’re planning a road trip along I-15 and the weather is looking threatening.

WUnderground.com For a quick overview of the various weather forecasting services, I use WUnderground and look at key sections of the route between Las Vegas and LA and in particular look at both the current local radar and predictions for wind speed and storm development at various points in a day.

Marshall Space Flight Center Earth Science Office. I use the formidable resources of the NASA Earth Science Office for looking at variety of satellite mapping images — when I am trying to figure out where a storm is going and what is likely to happen.

State Police Incident Reports. Both the Nevada Highway Patrol and California Highway Patrol post incident reports, on the public web, in the jurisdictions and one can drill down to get up to the moment reports of road conditions. So this morning I was able to find when the CHP began to shepard the snow plows working the Blue Cut area of the Cajon Pass. For instance if you go to this page, you can look up any of the current conditions for several of the CHP commands around the state. The Barstow region covers Primm to Barstow and the San Bernardino command covers the rest of the route.

Both the Nevada and California state highway departments also post road trip condition reports — but those are often not very specific.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it can provide useful and timely clues when making guesses about road conditions.