New Weather Data Site

[Donald Giuliano]

Amazing site! what are the chances of a satellite and radar map? and how about zoom capabilities?

We're focused on getting the models working first, and will think about doing observational data later. Dynamic zoom capabilities are unfortunately not possible with static images rendered on the server side, however we are considering something along the lines of a zoomed custom WRF run centered on risk areas (much like the Stormtrack WRF Tim linked to last week). Thanks for the suggestions!

--Don

 

[Steve Miller]

Yeah, I agree. Terrain shading on any map is not necessary. It's cool, but not necessary.
Is there a way to detect a user's connection and load maps accordingly? From home maps load almost instantly. I'll be out today and I'll give them a try on my sprint card but I suspect they will be annoyingly slow.

Once everything is squared away with the rendering, how quick do you think maps will display after a new model run?

 

[Stuart Robinson]

Simple !

A tick box to show / remove terrian from plots

 

[Steve Miller]

Genius! Here I am trying to make it harder on them - a tick box would be perfect!

 

[Johnathan Brouwer]

This is a good site. I appreciate the work you put into it.

I am curious, are you owned or funded by tornadovideos.net? They seem to be promoting you as theirs and was wondering the connection and what "being a component" means...

 

[Chris Foltz]

Don,

The site looks great. Any plans to create a floating sector or two centered on an area of potentially significant weather similar to what SPC does with their mesoanalysis page? Would make the isopleths on a few of the graphics a little easier to discern. Great job with what you guys have done so far. Looking forward to it's continued expansion.

EDIT: Guess I should have read all of the posts first as I see you've already answered a similar question.

 

[Donald Giuliano]

Once everything is squared away with the rendering, how quick do you think maps will display after a new model run?

We process the maps as soon as we get the data for a particular forecast hour and make them available immediately upon completion. In the case of the NAM, I think this takes about 60-90 seconds, so it's something like a 2-3 minute lag from the time the data appears. This may not always be the case, but I've noticed that we usually have our maps completed and available slightly before the NCEP website does.

This is a good site. I appreciate the work you put into it.

I am curious, are you owned or funded by tornadovideos.net? They seem to be promoting you as theirs and was wondering the connection and what "being a component" means...

Thanks for the compliment, we're glad you like it.

About your question, I'm not sure how we could be more clear that we are coordinating with TVN on this project. At least not without getting into the nuts and bolts of private business arrangements, which is not really appropriate.

 

[Donald Giuliano]

Now I Really like the sounding map – but it is actually quite a pain to use. What would be good is that if you can click on the goggle map, you can then redraw the Skew-T for that location. Hint – Google map can actually return a LAT/LON coordinate on mouse click and you could use that to relocate the Skew-T.

We've implemented this feature, so it should be much easier to navigate while looking at soundings. Hope you like it!

 

[Stuart Robinson]

Hi Donald,

Yes that works well. I can drag the Google map pointer to a new location and then reselect the plot and all is great - well done

 

[Stuart Robinson]

Page load time / redraw is still a tad poor - I see that you are running on an Apache server - have you enabled compression? (This is a quick win)

Also are you redrawing images on the fly directly from model data? Perhaps investigation into server image caching might help.

Over all the site is looking good and more important useful! I know over time you will add more features and Iron out bugs etc but for now you need to work on page load times

 

[Donald Giuliano]

Page load time / redraw is still a tad poor - I see that you are running on an Apache server - have you enabled compression? (This is a quick win)

Also are you redrawing images on the fly directly from model data? Perhaps investigation into server image caching might help.

Over all the site is looking good and more important useful! I know over time you will add more features and Iron out bugs etc but for now you need to work on page load times

Compression is indeed enabled, and I think the problem you're noting is related to drawing the soundings on the fly if someone has not yet already accessed that time/gridpoint. If someone's already created the file, we don't recreate it, but due to the high density of points in space and time there isn't as much overlap between page views as one might think. That's not really a problem in and of itself, as the real issue is that we're currently using php's exec() to call the script that creates the sounding, then waiting for it to return before proceeding. We need to instead have it return immediately and use an AJAX call to allow the rest of the page to load while waiting for the file to be created. We're hoping to fix this soon, which should make the user experience when interacting with the sounding page feel much smoother.

Thanks again for your critiques, we appreciate the feedback since it helps direct us to the most pressing issues.

**EDIT**

I should also note that there are a lot of improvements that could be made in the code as well to speed things up. The site is very much a work in progress.

 

[Connor McCrorey]

I agree with the tick box idea as far as terrain shading is concerned.

Great site overall. Any idea when other models will be added?

 

[Donald Giuliano]

I agree with the tick box idea as far as terrain shading is concerned.

Great site overall. Any idea when other models will be added?

We're hoping to have the RUC and GFS online by no later than the end of the year, but it could be earlier than that. It just depends on how much time we have to work on it.

--Don

 

[Donald Giuliano]

Page load time / redraw is still a tad poor - I see that you are running on an Apache server - have you enabled compression? (This is a quick win)

Stuart,

Although Apache had compression enabled, after a closer look I noticed our php.ini had compression turned off by default (!). I'd simply assumed it was turned on (bad idea!) and have changed this, and am curious to know whether or not the site seems to be loading more quickly for you. I checked to see how much it decreased the HTML download size on the default forecast page, and it was by roughly an order of magnitude from 44K to 4.3K (no surprise there). Thanks!!!!

--Don

 

[Robert Edmonds]

I like it, will be looking forward to you eventually adding the ruc/gfs!