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.

A severe weather outbreak occurred across the Tennessee Valley, southern Appalachians and into central Georgia/South Carolina, starting Friday, March 14th and continuing into today. One supercell thunderstorm developed west of Atlanta, quickly intensified and drug a tornado directly across downtown Atlanta causing extensive damage to many structures (including high-rises). The following HAMrad II animation shows the storm as it moved through downtown Atlanta and finally weakening after passing to the east of the city. The National Weather Service reported that based on the damage investigation, this tornado was an EF-2 with winds up to 130 mph and a path of about 6 miles.

The following is the official NWS report regarding their damage investigation on the Atlanta tornado:

0938 PM     TORNADO          1 NW ATLANTA            33.77N 84.43W
03/14/2008  F2               FULTON             GA   EMERGENCY MNGR

            NWS DAMAGE SURVEY CONCLUDED AN EF2 TORNADO 6 MILES LONG
            AND 200 YARDS WIDE TUCHED DOWN AT SIMPSON AND BURBANK
            ROAD AT 938 PM. IT MOVED ACROSS DOWNTOWN ATLANTA AND CAME
            UP AT THE CORNER OF BRAEBURN AND JOSEPHINE ROAD IN
            WESTERN DEKALB COUNTY.

Earlier today additional supercell thunderstorms developed across the northern suburbs of Atlanta bringing additional storm damage in the form of very strong winds, large hail and even several tornadoes. Several moved close to the HW offices in Kennesaw, including the storm depicted in the following image which brought up to 3″ diameter hail and a possible tornado near Canton just to the north of our offices.

The following map shows the official NWS storm reports across Georgia since yesterday, the second of which only showing the tornadoes and/or funnel clouds that were reported (click for full-size image).

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