After writing pretty much every morning for the past few months, I decided to take a little break. It helps there are no tropical systems running the Earth (well, except Tropical Cyclone Phyan which struck India’s Arabian coast just south of Mumbai, Maharashtra this morning).
As long as there are no active cyclones posts will come about once every other day or so. This will give me time to work on other articles and work on the new map I’ve had planned seemingly forever.
One of the first articles I’ll ahve coming up is a preliminary report on Ida. There isn’t much to write about. I want to go back and analyze the NHC’s forecast (track and intensity) and try to get my hands on some model runs and see how they performed.
Have you seen Ida, lately? The storm is a beast in the extratropical sense that will likely become a noreaster and bring some serious moisture to the northeast. There are storm warnings, gale warnings, coastal flood warnings, high surf advisories; you name it, it’s posted from the Carolinas northward.
Anyway, that’s the plan. I also have those write-ups on the metropolitan cities I wanted to get up on the site. I started with Brownsville and haven’t touched it in at least a month. So, hopefully now I’ll have time to wrap that up and move onto Corpus Christi. Stay tuned.
The website will undergo a migration today after yet another server failure through the hosting company, HostForWeb. I’m being told this will resolve the issues that have been plaguing the website over the last couple of weeks. If it doesn’t, I’ll be migrating the site myself to another host. I sincerely apologize for the continuing issues with the site loading and the database errors and assure you it is not going unnoticed. I appreciate your patience.
With the its-not-a-tropical-storm-but-a-warm-core-low-off-the-US storm approaching I’ve quickly added radar imagery from Norfolk, Virginia and Atlantic City, New Jersey to the standard map. It is not available on storm-specific tracking maps. I hope some of you find it useful. I’ll attempt to add more later tonight.
It came to my attention late tonight that there was an issue with this and other websites on my rented server not loading due to database issues. I apologize for this. This is the second time this server has had issues within a week and I have been looking at backup services but have not had time to implement them. With this Friday off and the weekend I will make arrangements so that if one server fails another will kick in immediately.
Again, I apologize for the errors.
Thankfully, and way too late, in my opinion, we’ve re-captured the tracking maps that were running on the website last year. For those of you who weren’t familiar with them, I’ll provide a little info shortly. First, let me say a few things. Continue reading…
First, my apologies for letting the website go for so long. It always seems once the season ends I forget about this baby and focus my attention on other projects. It wasn’t even until the last week or so I noticed much of the data was missing due to my careless efforts. That will not happen again.
You hopefully will notice that all Atlantic storm data has been replenished through 2007. I am currently in the process of adding all of 2008’s hurricane data. I hope to have that by the end of the day, today.
While I do still have other projects going on I am working on a detailed plan of features and fixes I want to apply to the website before the start of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season, May 15. I think for those of you whom have visited regularly you are well aware of those features and fixes so I won’t go into great detail.
I’ll post more as I get a chance. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions at all or see any issues, please don’t hesitate to let me know. I will get everything fixed as soon as possible.
Thank you all for your patience.
Update
As of this morning (Feb 22, 2009) all 2008 storm data has been added (and backed up!).
As you can see we’ve made some significant changes to the Personal Hurricane Center.com Interactive Tracking Map. Now, when there is an active storm that displays on the map on the home page, you not only can cick on the icon and follow a link to the storm’s web page, but you can also click on past plot points and get information for the storm at that point. This is true for all of the tracking maps.
In addition, we’ve added a Terrain map that will help you get a better idea for what type of landmass the storm will be traversing upon.
Furthermore, on the storm’s web page, if the storm is active, the controls have been adjusted to form checkboxes. I’m sorry for using the icons before; I made an incorrect assumption that icons would look better than checkboxes. I don’t think it was so much that I was wrong, but rather the icons were completely non-descriptive and I never got a chance to really make something to explain what each of the icons did. When I can, I will dress up the checkboxes to make them look better and not as clustered. Please bear with me until then.
The tracking map seems to have no issues as tested on Firefox 3.0.1 and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. I will check this afternoon to see if it is working on other setups. In the meantime, if you have any issues, please let me know.
Thank you all for your patience!
Real brief as there’s a lot to do and not enough time…many of you have already noticed we have added several features to our interactive hurricane tracking map. These features will only show up for active storms; currently Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna. Here is a list of what’s been added:
- Spaghetti models (UKMET and GFDL to be added today)
- Radar
- Surface Observations
- National Hurricane Center official forecast for the storm
- Current wind radius and eye overlays
- Forecasted wind radius
- Storm Reports (tropical and non-tropical)
- Hurricane heat potential (for Gulf of mexico, currently)
These features can be accessed via the buttons that appear below the tracking chart. A legend is on the right hand side of the web page.
We will still be trying to update new features as fast as possible. In the meantime we hope you enjoy!
