As part of the new Forecasts page we're introducing a new take on weather radar: the SparkRadar.
The SparkRadar shows you the distance to the precipitation that has been occurring around the current location over the last 12 hours, thereby giving you an immediate at-a-glance overview of the precipitation situation without having to view a full radar animation.
Check out your local forecast and let us know what you think!
We've been tracking the forecasts issued by the different forecasting agencies for a period of time now, and have put together a new type of report to cover how well the forecasts perform.
Check out:
We'll be looking into ways to bring this information to you within the actual forecasts, as well as adding more forecast sources.
Enjoy!
We have greatly expanded the previous Report feature and renamed it Averages.
There are several new sections to the report and it now also has rich inline graphs with links back to the dashboard if you want to explore the data further.
We're starting out with averages for the year and months, and are planning to add days when we get a chance.
Enjoy!
I just recently went on my first round of golf in more than 20 years, and wanted to check out the weather for the local courses.
Doing this with WeatherSpark was pretty straightforward. First I checked out Google maps for golf courses in SF. Then I pulled out the addresses for the ones that looked interesting:
Then I copy-pasted those addresses one-by-one into the WeatherSpark search box, being sure to hold down shift when doing the search to compare them. For points-of-interest like golf courses you can sometimes use the name of the location, and sometimes you'll need to enter the actual street address.
For playing golf, I'm interested in the temperature, wind speed, if it'll rain, and when the sun rises and sets. So I use the "Select Graphs..." feature to pick out the Sun & Moon, Precipitation Amount (it's golf, so less than 1/4 inch doesn't count), Temperature, and Wind Speed series. The result is:
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| The weather at four different golf courses in SF |
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Looking in the graph it's clear that Gleneagles Golf Course will be significantly warmer tomorrow than the others, with a Presidio a distant but notable second. It'll be a bit windy across all of the courses, but no rain is expected.
Using the "Link" feature I can now get a link to precisely this view (making sure to include the selected graphs!) and bookmark that for future use: http://weatherspark.com/...
This general method works for any outdoor activity where you have several locations to choose between such as hiking, mountain biking, climbing, going to the beach, skiing, hunting, etc.
The service that translates what you type into the search box into a location on the map left a little to be desired in this exercise - ideally it would know about golf courses and simply allow you to type the name in. This worked for some but not all of the courses. It's on the todo-list to upgrade to a better service.
It has long been known that the Santa Ana winds contribute to the fall forest fires in southern California. We wanted to see just how bad this can get by doing some investigative historical weather journalism.
The Witch Creek Fire ravaged northern San Diego in late October 2007. The fire started on October 21 at 12:35pm near Santa Ysabel (the rightmost blue pin), spread westwards and wasn't contained until ten days later.
| The extent of the fire (based on Wikipedia) | The two weather stations used for the investigation |
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| The weather graph for the two stations |
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By about 9am on that fateful October morning the strong, warm, dry, eastern Santa Ana winds had set in. This can be seen in the sharp drop in the humidity reported at the weather stations, together with the drastic increase in wind speed and focus in the wind direction, coming from the east.
Shortly thereafter, at 12:35pm, the fire started. Helped by the strong winds it spread westward, knocking out one of the two weather stations (note the gap in the black trace, may have been due to evacutations) and eventually jumping the I-15.
The days following the start of the fire turned into a blaze of burning trees, burning homes, and evacuations. The fire burned almost 200,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,500 buildings. It wasn't contained until October 31st. It is the fifth largest wildfire in California on record.
References:
We've been busy fixing a lot little things on the site:
Enjoy!
We've updated the default dashboard layout to make it easier for first-time visitors. The default view now consists of a temperature graph with an auto-scaled Y-axis to make the most of the space, together with a row of icons depicting the forecasted conditions, and the amount of expected precipitation. A separate graph below shows the wind using intuitive arrows.
By default we now only show one forecast to simplify the initial display. Just click the forecast button to switch source or show all of them.
We've also greatly expanded the link feature so that you can now save specific graph configurations. This allows you to recall specific views using a simple bookmark.
To save all your configuration settings, just click on "Link" in the header section, then click on the "save settings link" at the bottom of the dialog and then click "Bookmark". This link can also be shared.
We hope you enjoy the updates. If you like the site, please spread the word!
August 4, 2011: Pastcasts now available! Little nubbins in the History/Today/Forecast/Averages header section indicate when there's a pastcast available. Simply click the nubbin to load it. This displays the forecast for the current weather station, as fetched at that point in time, allowing you to see how well the forecasts fare against the actual outcome.
July 28, 2011: Made precipitation amount, precipitation rate, and wind speed plot logarithmically to allow for extreme values while still keeping the graph sane. Added submenus to the Select Graphs... menu to allow configuration of per-graph settings. More UI tweaks and minor bug fixes.
July 27, 2011: A bunch of minor bugfixes and minor UI updates.
June 28, 2011: Extended historical radar to include back to the beginning of 2007. Improved the map sun indicator to include sunset & sunrise.
June 27, 2011: Added map sun indicator. Added a drop shadow to the radar image and improved the map pan-performance when showing the radar image.
June 22, 2011: Made radar more up to date (now only 5 minutes back if possible, used to be a 10 minute delay) and switched the default map type to the terrain map instead of the plain one. Added sunrise/sunset time indicators to the sun graph (and the temperature graph when the sun trace is added to it).
June 21, 2011: Added wind arrows to the map, added optional dew point and sun traces to the temperature graph, added optional temperature trace to dew point graph. Added current conditions to the map station tool tip. Added map type option (plain and terrain). Several small bug fixes.
June 16, 2011: Added a video tutorial.
June 8, 2011: Added animation of the data shown in the weather stations, expanded the series that can be shown on the map to include dew point, pressure, and humidity, and extended the animation range to include 2009.
So when playing the radar animation, the corresponding value for each weather station is also shown. This makes for some really cool animations: see how the temperature is suppressed by the rain and how the high & low pressure zones move with the storms!
You can easily select a time slice for animation by holding down shift while clicking and dragging in the graph. A faint line in the graph indicates what time slice is currently shown on the map.
Also added full-screen mode. Full-screen mode disables sleep mode, so if you want to keep the application running indefinitely you can now easily do that.
June 2, 2011: Added a new forecast source: Weather Central (WXC). Some design updates and a new dashboard tab.
May 23, 2011: Front page redesign: cleaned it up & styled it a bit.
May 17, 2011: Animated radar added. You can view up to 5 days of continuous radar animation for the conterminous United States (CONUS) and Hawaii, and the history currently goes back to the beginning of 2010 for CONUS (sadly we only have recent radar images for Hawaii). We're working on extending the historical coverage.
May 4, 2011: Simple forecast tab added. It's not the default tab yet as we're still experimenting with it - feedback encouraged! We've also added the forecasted amount of precipitation (as opposed to just the probability of precipitation).
April 29, 2011: Climate Trends Tool - view the data underlying global climate research! Be sure to read the details.
March 31, 2011: Big update: we're now in the Chrome App Store, have per-graph unit customization (click the drop-down button next to F|C up right), and several new graphs: dew point, humidity, and two more for precipitation. Enjoy!
March 23, 2011: We're relocating our offices - please pardon any delays in responding to feedback this week. We're very excited about all the new visitors, and can't wait to roll out new features to the site!
March 18, 2011: Weather reports are now back online with a very scalable backend, so check out e.g. San Francisco on March 16.
March 16, 2011: Lots of excitement on LifeHacker via Kottke! Unfortunately our current weather report backend didn't quite scale enough to meet demand, so we've had to temporarily disable them. Will get them back as soon as we can!
March 16, 2011: Introducing weather reports! These are in-depth printable descriptions of the weather in any location on any day of the year. Currently text only, graphs will be forthcoming. Check out San Francisco on March 16, or why not Honolulu?
March 11, 2011: Servers are holding up, and we have been making a lot of little behind-the-scenes updates to keep the system running smoothly in the face of ramping traffic (nothing like patching your web framework in the middle of a traffic spike to make it deal with proxy caching correctly ;). We're very excited about the user response - you rock! And keep the feature requests & bug reports coming - sorry for any delays in responding, we're working as hard as we can.
March 10, 2011: Lots of excitement on Reddit and Metafilter!
March 7, 2011: You can now compare multiple locations to each other and have the graphs overlaid. Check out San Francisco vs New York. Just hold down shift when clicking on a station or when pressing enter in the search box. Also works with the list of most recently used stations: just hold down shift while clicking on the link. You can compare up to four locations at once (gets a bit cluttered beyond that ;)
March 7, 2011: The current conditions are now promptly updated. The stations report new conditions once an hour, and within just a few minutes of the report the data is available on the site. Thanks everyone who reported the bug in the initial release!