Snow & Weather

I have finally changed the Automatic Weather Station (AWS) markers on The Australian Weather Observations Map on The Weather Chaser to use a standard form for marking wind speed and direction. This allows you to much more easily get an idea of the wind speed at a particular location at a glance. One full barb means 10 knots, half 5 knots, with a triangle meaning 50 knots. Here are some samples :

	Calm
	5 knots
	10 knots
	15 knots
	20 knots
	40 knots
	50 knots
	55 knots

On a related note, weather radar overlay data is still available, but currently shipping data has been disabled due to a change in the source data format. Due to security reasons, the ship identifier is now not available, which means we now can’t track individual ships.
Link : >>Australian Weather Observations Map

A new website is now in the process of being created called The Weather Archive. The first content there is an interactive map of the seasons for the entire world. This has been created using data from NASA’s Blue Marble project, and has been integrated using the Google Maps API.
You can do most of the things you can do on google maps, except you get to choose the background satellite image based upon a specific month of the year. The resolution isn’t as high as the default Google Satellite data, but it does provide an interesting view into the way in which the world changes through the seasons. You can see vegitation drying out, snow blanketing large areas in winter, and swathes of green appearing. You can create and bookmark your own specific links to the page, as well as email them.

Link : >> The World Through the Seasons

Whilst not the most interesting start, I have setup relevant newsgroups on The Snow Chaser. These are mostly related to snow sports.

Snow Discussions.

This site has outgrown its name, and actually spans a much broader range of topics than it may suggest. As such a pair of new sites is now under construction. The new ’snow’ site The Snow Chaser will feature most of the content from snow.barratt.com.au, but also new things including snow related information for the rest of the world. Other parts of this site will be hosted/moved on a separate new site, The Weather Chaser where it more generally relates to the weather. However due to the close relationship between the content of the two, there will be a lot of sharing of content between them. More updates here as changes progress!

With the development of Hurricane Wilma I have created a 48hr animation showing it’s formation into a category 5 hurricane and its path through the carribean.
Hurricane Wilma 48hr Satellite animation

I have just added a new Composite radar for coastal New South Wales, Australia. This also contains ’sparklines’ that indicate the last 24 hours of temperature and precipitation for a number of locations (in no particular order) :

Sydney
Wagga Wagga
Thredbo
Mt. Ginni
Cabramarra
Albury
Goulburn
Young XXX
Mt.Boyce
Dubbo
Port Macquarie
Newcastle
Coffs Harbour
Evans Head
Grafton
Walget
Coonamble
Narrabri
Condobolin
Scone
Gosford
Orange
Merimbula
Ulladulla

The spark lines also show minimum, maximum, and average temperatures for that period either side of the sparkline.

I have also updated the South Eastern Autralia version (essentially Victoria) to show more observation locations. Additions here are :

Stawell
Orbost
Hopetoun
Sheoaks
Deniliquin

Yet another Tropical Event, this time near Japan. A satellite animation has been added for Typhoon Saola.

With Hurricane Rita now having developed into a strong Hurricane the Hurricane Rita satellite animation has been updated and an Animation from the Key West Radar in Florida has been added. This new radar animation shows the hurricane developing and crossing over into the Gulf before moving out of the range of the radar.

With Tropical Storm Rita developing in the Atlantic Ocean and currently moving into the Gulf of Mexico, could it develop into Hurricane Rita and hit the US Gulf coast later this week? I have put up an animation of the last 48 hours of this storm up here. As the storm develops I will update it.

I have just updated the Interactive Autralian Observations Map with a number of enhancements :

• Added a scale to the bottom LHS
• Added a search facility that searches from a database of around 65,000 Australian locations and presents a list of possible options. If you specify a state it will only show locations within that state. Clicking on one of the search results takes you to that location.
• When you select one of the locations found via a search a second search box is updated that shows all the nearby locations, sorted by distance with a bearing, and a link to allow you to add a marker for that location.
• Selecting one of these ’secondary’ nearby results also updates the ‘nearby’ list so you can continue to select locations near the previously clicked one.
• I have turned off the ship tracks by default as in IE this was causing a slow down, and they only worked in Firefox anyway. They can however still be turned on in Firefox.