Woohoo!  A much overdue update to the Personal Weather Station (PWS) project has been released!

http://www.pwsweather.com

Since 2000, HAMweather and WeatherForYou have helped bring the PWS community together by allowing users to post their observations to a central service with the ability to integrate this data into their HAMweather installations.  HAMweather and WeatherForYou have joined forces once again to improve the tools available for the PWS community, with the release of the PWSweather.com website.

PWSweather.com provides a great new feature set for PWS users in a fast, clean and ad free interface. Some of the new features include:

• Improved registration process
• Improved display of a stations latest observations and archived data:
    As seen for Station KORGRANT1 in Grants Pass, OR:
    http://www.pwsweather.com/obs/KORGRANT1.html

  

• New Google Maps Mashup to view and find other Personal Weather Stations.

  

The release of PWSweather.com is only the beginning, as  HAMweather and WeatherForYou are committed to continously expanding and improving PWSweather to bring additional features and tools to the PWS community.

Expanding on the great success of our HAMrad I service, we have been busily working to create our upcoming HAMrad II service which is now in live beta testing.

http://mapcenter.hamweather.net/radar/ptype/latest/us.html

Some of the great new features of HAMrad II include:

• Greatly improved precipitation type maps.
• Higher resolutions providing for improved quality and details. The following sample image shows how closely related the topographical base map is with the actual precipitation type (rain in the lowlands versus snow in the higher elevations).
  
• Now more than 170 views with the addition of over 120 local views. Click through directly to many of the local views by hovering over the Continental US map and selecting the highlighted areas.
• Optional topographical or flat base maps.
• New capability for overlays which can be applied directly to the image or displayed via Javascript, including: warnings, counties, interstates, rivers, radar summaries and more.
• New radar imagery, including composite reflectivity, 1-hour precipitation totals, storm precipitation totals, vertically integrated liquid and echo tops.
• Animation options of 2, 6, 12 and 24 hours.
• Standard sizes now include 800×600.

As always, and especially during our beta period, we welcome comments and suggestions. No official go-live date has been set but will be determined by the beta testing period.

Is it going to be colder than normal? I’m going on vacation in June, what will the weather be like?
These are common questions that we are often asked. To help answer these questions, we are introducing the new climate area, accessible via:

http://climate.hamweather.com

The new climate area incorporates data from several sources into a user friendly and easily accessible format. Some of the great features of the climate area include:

• Records Events - View the records set over the past couple days, the past week or even a specific date from the past couple years. You can mouse over the map to view individual records or in tabular format below the map.
   
• Normals – HAMweather has created a collection of maps that detail the normal precipitation, highs, lows and mean temperatures for all 365 days of the year, as well as monthly and yearly summaries. Maps are available for the Continental US, 9 regional views, Alaska and Hawaii.One of my favorite maps from this set is the CONUS view of the yearly precipitation. This map allows you to easily depict the drier conditions east of the Rockies and the increased areas of precipitation in the southeast by the Gulf of Mexico.

  Another great feature of the Normals area and many of the other maps is the ability to click on a regional map to view a tooltip of the data near the location clicked on the map:
  
  In the tooltip you can click the “More Details” link to view the normals in tabular form, either a daily view for the month or a monthly view for the year.
   

• Temperature Change – The improved temperature change maps provide the change in temperature as compared to 24 hours ago, as well as 1 hour ago. Like most of the other regional views, clicking on the map will display more information for the location clicked:
  
  The southeast was definitely much cooler the morning of the Feb 27^th than it was the morning of Feb 26^th!
   
• Forecasted Departure from Normal Highs (and Lows) – As part of the short-term outlooks, these maps are providing the forecasted departure from the normal highs and lows for days 1 through 7.
  Here we can see the forecasted highs for the central plains on Feb 28^th, look to be above normal.
  
• Long Term Outlooks – This map set, based on data provided by the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, display the probabilities of the temperatures and precipitation being above or below normal for a specific time range. Available ranges include days 8-14, the next month and for the next year in three month intervals.

Upcoming HWClimate Service
Within the next couple of weeks, HAMweather will begin offering a HWClimate content service. With this service, you will be able to add custom branded map images and data to your websites, visual displays, mobile devices and more. More details to come.

The development of HAMweather 4 (HW4) is going quite smoothly, and several new features have been integrated into its core code base. One such feature is the ability to cache the output of a request so that future requests within a set cache time can simply output the cached page without having to load and process the various modules and data. For high volume access this feature can save a lot of time and resources. HAMweather has been using this feature on our Tropics Center (which uses HW4 alpha code) with great success. Thus, HW3cacher was developed so that HW3 users can benefit from the increase in efficiency as well until HW4 is released.

The HW3cacher script is used as a front end to the HW3php script. When installed, the script will cache HW output on the original request. Then on future requests for the same URL the data in the cache will be used and the HW3 script will not be loaded. If the cached output has expired, then HW3 will be loaded and the output regenerated and cached once more.

During our testing a standard HW3php request for a local forecast used up to 4MB of memory and 1.3 seconds to fetch, parse and output the data. When using HW3cacher, once cached subsequent requests for the same URL used only 0.25-0.5MB of memory and only took 0.02 seconds to output to the web browser. This data shows that subsequent requests for the same URL use up to 94% less memory and are outputted up to 65 times faster than calling HW3 directly. Note that each individual user/server will experience different results based on the available server resources, network speeds and server specifications.

While the HW3cacher script is primarily designed for high volume websites that receive a high number of HW3 requests for the same data within a short amount of time, other sites can benefit from HW3cacher as well. For example, a site can benefit from HW3cacher if weather data is included on the home page via calls to HW3php or when inclement weather occurs in a location and the site receives an abnormally larger number of requests for a specific local forecast etc.

Downloads Via Plugins Area: http://support.hamweather.com/dload.php?action=file&file_id=169

Documentation:
HTML: http://www.hamweather.com/hw3/docs/hw3php/HW3Cacher_php/
PDF: http://www.hamweather.com/hw3/docs/hw3php/HW3Cacher_php/HW3Cacher_php.pdf

Support: http://support.hamweather.com

The new HAMvid Basic Package allows you to add select HAMvid branded feeds to your website for free! Now you can easily add the HAMvid weather content delivery system to your site.

The select HAMvid feeds available in the HAMvid Basic package currently include:

National Current Conditions - Includes current conditions of the Continental US displayed on animated maps.
US National Summary - Provides current conditions and forecasts for major cities through our the US.
Local Weather Outlook - Displays the local current conditions, shortterm outlook and 7 day forecast for US zip codes.

Integration into a web page is as simple as adding a single <script> tag to the web page or HAMweather template where you would like the HAMvid player to be displayed.

Start using HAMvid basic today and enjoy the benefits of an improved web visitor experience and loyalty.

Thank you Kiko! 

Thanks to Tropical Storm Kiko, I was finally able to debug the wind field forecast plotting in the HWTropical 3 plugin.  HWTropical 3 uses data obtained from the forecast advisory product to generate the maps. The feature includes the ability to display the wind fields for each individual location or to have a forecast swath plotted. That data supports plotting forecasted wind fields at 34, 50 and 64 knot intervals.  I will be cleaning the code and adding support to the templates for including in HWTropical 3.0 Final.  Look for a release over the next day or two.

Below is a sample Wind Field Forecast map. Visit our tropics area for the latest image: