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Instant Weather Maps site and app


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App available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch! Check post 61 for details

Introducing InstantWeatherMaps.com, a new weather model website. The site has a lag (from when the raw data appears on the NCEP FTP server) of 1-20 seconds, compared to around 100 seconds for the closest other free site (the new NCEP site). I offer over 150 variables, including Kuchera-method snowfall (otherwise only found on Earl Barker's site, which has a lag of around 30-90 minutes). Over 4 million GFS, NAM, RUC, and ECMWF model maps are on my server at any given time. I would appreciate any suggestions as to future enhancements I could make to my site.

http://www.instantweathermaps.com

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I hate to critique a free site but I imagine that's what OP wants...

- Definitely need some kind of looping/scrolling capability

- Needs more models

Lots of data available for the one model on there, but if you want more people to use it, it's gotta become more user friendly and include more models.

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Great site; I will be using this exclusively for GFS maps from now on (unless I need something your site doesn't have). It needs more models though... sure the GFS is the most-viewed model, but the NAM comes pretty darn close, and of course the RUC and HRRR would be good to add for those situations when updates every 6 hours are not enough. Any chance you will be getting individual member GEFS and SREF maps anytime soon? I would LOVE to see Kuchera on those!

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Then two meter temps and dew points in Fahrenheit would be better. Precip in inches too. ;)

Those are already available under "Single-Variable FPS-System".

I hate to critique a free site but I imagine that's what OP wants...

- Definitely need some kind of looping/scrolling capability

- Needs more models

Lots of data available for the one model on there, but if you want more people to use it, it's gotta become more user friendly and include more models.

I will probably be adding more models in the next few weeks or so, and I hope to make loops available in time for winter.

Great site; I will be using this exclusively for GFS maps from now on (unless I need something your site doesn't have). It needs more models though... sure the GFS is the most-viewed model, but the NAM comes pretty darn close, and of course the RUC and HRRR would be good to add for those situations when updates every 6 hours are not enough. Any chance you will be getting individual member GEFS and SREF maps anytime soon? I would LOVE to see Kuchera on those!

I hope to eventually have all of those... and yes, Kuchera maps will be available for every model that outputs the necessary parameters.

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Here's one little thing I found...

Here's the discription for Lifted Index:

Lifted index is a measurement of the stability of an air mass at a given moment. Positive values denote stable air masses, and negative values denote unstable air masses. Negative values are an indication that strong thunderstorms may occur in the area. On our weather maps, lifted index is given in kelvins.

but the scale you use looks like a Celsius scale...not to mention I'm pretty sure you can't have negative values in kelvins :unsure:

The lifted index is a difference between two temperatures, so essentially Kelvins and degrees Celsius are the same thing, and yes, it can be negative (for example, 300K - 305K is -5K). I call them Kelvins instead of degrees Celsius because that is the terminology that GrADS gives me in the .ctl files.

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Here's one little thing I found...

Here's the discription for Lifted Index:

Lifted index is a measurement of the stability of an air mass at a given moment. Positive values denote stable air masses, and negative values denote unstable air masses. Negative values are an indication that strong thunderstorms may occur in the area. On our weather maps, lifted index is given in kelvins.

but the scale you use looks like a Celsius scale...not to mention I'm pretty sure you can't have negative values in kelvins :unsure:

Oh dear.

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Just now corrected a major error that was causing some of the navigation options to be obscured.

I was wondering why I couldn't find most of the maps... I had just figured that they were to be added in the near future. Thanks, and great site (the Previous and Next buttons are a great touch)! Still, more models would be appreciated.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Nice job...I built a site of my own a while back featuring NAM and GFS output. I need to take up PHP to make it more interactive at some point and add more models. I have a current weather page as well, but it's kind of rudimentary. Like my site, it looks like you use GrADS for the model graphics. GrADS is nice since it doesn't have much of a learning curve and is easy to install and use on a web server, unlike GEMPAK which requires many dependencies, is cumbersome, and is a b**** to install. GrADS also generates images much faster than GEMPAK I've noticed.

Although I'd like to add more models to my site, I'm on a shared server due to costs and am only allowed to a small number of cron jobbed scripts simultaneously, something that creating more model graphics would require. I tried to get my scripts to fetch the grib files within seconds of coming up on the NCEP servers, but the timing varies slightly from run to run. As such, if the grib files came out a few minutes later than usual, my scripts would fail. As such, I had to cron my scripts to fetch the gribs about 5 minutes later than the average time the file becomes available on NCEP's server.

I tried to create regional model graphics on my site to make it a little more unique. As for the looping stuff, I found some javascript code on another site, which you're free to copy and paste if you'd like.

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