KB8SEW Weather, Sorta

Weather Almanac

Forecast Map

Local Forecast Map

Pressure Map

Surface Analysis Map

See other Almanacs -> Albion Allendale Alma Baldwin Battle Creek Big Rapids Bloomingdale Charlotte Eagle East Lansing Eaton Rapids Fremont Grand Haven Grand Ledge Grand Rapids Hart Hastings Hesperia Holland Ionia Jackson Kalamazoo Lansing Lowell Muskegon Scottville South Haven Vicksburg White Cloud

These are a few scripts that I whipped together in a few minutes, and then spent a great while longer tweaking them.

The Almanac images are used by using the lat / lon data for the cities in the pulldown.  The script then figures out the elevation via USGS data.  Using the lat / lon / elevation data, it can then tell you when the sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset will occur.  It can also gather information pertaining to the seasons and moon phases.  Lastly, it gathers the Historical Climate data for that city from the National Weather Service.  These images are auto-generated every night. 

The forecast will bring up a map of Michigan showing the 23 counties that the Grand Rapids Weather office serves. You can then click on one of the counties and it will show you the forecast for that day in a new window. This is that latest (notice I did not say greatest) that I have and this is done automatically. I have another script that monitors the National Weather Service's forecasts for this area and if they change, I download them and store them in a MySQL database. When you open this page, it calls for the latest one.

The radar pages and the satellite pages are all the same with one minor change - they look at a different set of images. This Java Applet was written by Tom Whittaker and reads a file, puts the pictures in order, puts the overlays together, then starts the slideshow. The images will update every 5 minutes if there is an update. When you pull up the page, it downloads all the images first and then starts the slideshow. In the background, there are a couple of scripts that run every minute or to check if there are any new images. If there are, it downloads them, gets rid of the old ones, and creates a new thumbnail as seen on the left hand side of all the pages here.

There's also a page with RSS Feeds where you can pick pages based on the counties you are interested in.

The beauty of this is that I have to do nothing and the information updates itself, much like you see for the Hazardous Weather Outlook and the Weather Alerts pages. When you can have a website that updates itself, it"s a beautiful thing.