Rob H
EF5
I've created a simple web application to view synoptic features alongside storm reports that I thought I'd share with the community. I did this partly because I wanted to play with the Google Maps API and didn't know what to plot, and partly because I have a bunch of SPC and HPC data and images and I wanted a way to mash up all the data instead of having to look at multiple images side by side or by manually querying the db.
http://66.41.225.80/storm/default.aspx
(connection might be spotty, since it's not hosted at a real location yet)
Select your filters, pick a date, and click 'Reload' to display the data. Clicking the +3/-3 and Previous/Next buttons will automatically reload. The storm reports data is from the Storm Data .csv files and covers hail, tornado, and wind reports from 1950-2009. The HPC synoptic data is from coded bulletins from roughly 2003-2010.
If you pull up 5/5/07 3z, you'll see events from 1:30z-4:30z. I did this so that you can see what the synoptic features looked like for the reports that happened in the same time frame. It didn't make sense to show tornadoes that happened 18 hours earlier when the synoptic setup looked very different.
Instead of picking a date from the calendar, or going every 3 hours, there's also an event dropdown, where you can easily skip to the next/previous outbreak, instance of massive hail, etc.
Known issues: Missing HPC data. The HPC was extremely kind to help collect and provide their synoptic data but they found some bugs with their procedures. As a result, some random chunks of data are missing, including 00z for a large number of days in the past year or two.
Future plans:
Please let me know if you think this is useful or even mildly interesting, or if you have any bug reports or suggestions. Special thanks to Mark K. at the HPC, Nick Nolte, and a few others for inspiring me and pointing me in the right direction!
edit: Thanks Michael, it should be fixed now.
http://66.41.225.80/storm/default.aspx
(connection might be spotty, since it's not hosted at a real location yet)
Select your filters, pick a date, and click 'Reload' to display the data. Clicking the +3/-3 and Previous/Next buttons will automatically reload. The storm reports data is from the Storm Data .csv files and covers hail, tornado, and wind reports from 1950-2009. The HPC synoptic data is from coded bulletins from roughly 2003-2010.
If you pull up 5/5/07 3z, you'll see events from 1:30z-4:30z. I did this so that you can see what the synoptic features looked like for the reports that happened in the same time frame. It didn't make sense to show tornadoes that happened 18 hours earlier when the synoptic setup looked very different.
Instead of picking a date from the calendar, or going every 3 hours, there's also an event dropdown, where you can easily skip to the next/previous outbreak, instance of massive hail, etc.
Known issues: Missing HPC data. The HPC was extremely kind to help collect and provide their synoptic data but they found some bugs with their procedures. As a result, some random chunks of data are missing, including 00z for a large number of days in the past year or two.
Future plans:
- Trying to manually add as much of the missing HPC data that I can - especially for big events
- Small rewrite to make the page more AJAXy so it doesn't reload every time a date/time is changed
- Working on getting surface and upper air data, and NEXRAD data, so you can also overlay that information
- Incorporate unofficial SPC reports and update SPC/HPC data as it comes in. Right now storm data stops after 2009, and HPC data stops sometime in Oct. 2010
- I'm playing around with some distance-calculating algorithms to see if I can sort tornadoes by type of front they were near, if they were in the warm sector or on the front, etc. We'll see how this goes, but it feels very rough
- Actually host it somewhere so people can't bombard the site and take it down easily when I'm doing other things on the box
Please let me know if you think this is useful or even mildly interesting, or if you have any bug reports or suggestions. Special thanks to Mark K. at the HPC, Nick Nolte, and a few others for inspiring me and pointing me in the right direction!
edit: Thanks Michael, it should be fixed now.
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