| Forecast Map | Local Forecast Map | Pressure Map | Pressure w/ Satelite Map |
| Forecast Map | Local Forecast Map | Pressure Map | Pressure w/ Satelite Map |
This is a couple of scripts that I whipped together in a few minutes, and then spent a great while longer tweaking them. 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.
