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Instant Weather Maps site and app


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The site's back up now... turns out I had put "=" instead of "==" inside a conditional, and that caused many of the maps to not generate. Lag is still 2-15 seconds though.

Site looks great! I love the GrADS images. I'll give you a shout out on Twitter and might be able to link to you on our webpage.

John

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  • 2 weeks later...

Changed from NOMADS to a data source that's about 12 seconds faster, made map generation speeds more consistent (always well under 2 seconds to first map from when the files are up on the data server), added snow depth maps for hours 204-384, and changed hours 204-384 from 2.5-degree to 1.0-degree resolution (yes it does exist... no, not too many sites use it)

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Changed from NOMADS to a data source that's about 12 seconds faster, made map generation speeds more consistent (always well under 2 seconds to first map from when the files are up on the data server), added snow depth maps for hours 204-384, and changed hours 204-384 from 2.5-degree to 1.0-degree resolution (yes it does exist... no, not too many sites use it)

Just curious what that source is. Can't be much faster than the NCEP ftp server I'd think.

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It is the NCEP FTP server... NOMADS, which I was using before, is about 10-15 seconds slower. Oh, and btw the changes started on the 2011-08-08 18Z run.

The data destined for NOMADS hop through the NCEP ftp server...hence the delay.

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Nice job...I built a site of my own a while back featuring NAM and GFS output. I need to take up PHP to make it more interactive at some point and add more models. I have a current weather page as well, but it's kind of rudimentary. Like my site, it looks like you use GrADS for the model graphics. GrADS is nice since it doesn't have much of a learning curve and is easy to install and use on a web server, unlike GEMPAK which requires many dependencies, is cumbersome, and is a b**** to install. GrADS also generates images much faster than GEMPAK I've noticed.

Although I'd like to add more models to my site, I'm on a shared server due to costs and am only allowed to a small number of cron jobbed scripts simultaneously, something that creating more model graphics would require. I tried to get my scripts to fetch the grib files within seconds of coming up on the NCEP servers, but the timing varies slightly from run to run. As such, if the grib files came out a few minutes later than usual, my scripts would fail. As such, I had to cron my scripts to fetch the gribs about 5 minutes later than the average time the file becomes available on NCEP's server.

I tried to create regional model graphics on my site to make it a little more unique. As for the looping stuff, I found some javascript code on another site, which you're free to copy and paste if you'd like.

Your cron 'script' can be more than just one action, it can be a complete program if you want.. e.g. instead of calling

wget http://weather.site/weather.data

do

/home/youruser/script.sh

and inside the script you can do all sorts of things, like conditionals, launching other scripts, etc, etc.. also you can just create your own download daemon instead of running the command each time.. e.g. instead of exiting after image is updated, start the routine again.

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Your cron 'script' can be more than just one action, it can be a complete program if you want.. e.g. instead of calling

wget http://weather.site/weather.data

do

/home/youruser/script.sh

and inside the script you can do all sorts of things, like conditionals, launching other scripts, etc, etc.. also you can just create your own download daemon instead of running the command each time.. e.g. instead of exiting after image is updated, start the routine again.

+1 to that... if you have multiple items to do in succession, just make a shell script and cron it instead of cronning every single call.

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Your cron 'script' can be more than just one action, it can be a complete program if you want.. e.g. instead of calling

wget http://weather.site/weather.data

do

/home/youruser/script.sh

and inside the script you can do all sorts of things, like conditionals, launching other scripts, etc, etc.. also you can just create your own download daemon instead of running the command each time.. e.g. instead of exiting after image is updated, start the routine again.

+1 to that... if you have multiple items to do in succession, just make a shell script and cron it instead of cronning every single call.

Thanks...I've actually already done this. I have a batch shell script that does the file downloading and then invokes several other Perl, shell, and GrADS scripts to generate the graphics, clean-up, and update the html pages. The NAM and GFS each have their own batch scripts, which are very similar.

My issue is that my webhost won't allow more than two simultaneous cron jobs, and in order to mitigate this issue I'd probably have to upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated server, which costs $.

I use HostGator, which I've found to be very good considering it's shared hosting. The server is quite stable and my scripts pretty much never fail. I am hoping to speed up my update time and add RUC imagery soon. For me, it's pretty much a matter of making the most of the resources I have available to me.

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Please clear your cache and try again. I recently changed the URL names (my reasons for doing this are fairly complex, but to put it simply an optimization I made on the new server necessitated the change), so old bookmarks will not work. If you continue to have problems, please e-mail me your IP address and the approximate date and time in UTC that you accessed the site. You can find your IP address at http://www.whatismyip.com and you can press Contact on my website's nav bar for my e-mail address.

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Introducing InstantWeatherMaps.com, a new weather model website. The site has a lag (from when the raw data appears on the NOMADS server) of 2-15 seconds, compared to around 90 seconds for the closest other free site (the new beta NCEP site). I offer over 150 variables, including Kuchera-method snowfall (otherwise only found on Earl Barker's site, which has a lag of around 30-90 minutes). Nearly a half-million GFS model maps are on my server at any given time. I would appreciate any suggestions as to future enhancements I could make to my site.

http://www.instantweathermaps.com

Thank you. Very clean and easy to navigate.

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I got a few 404s using Chrome but no issues after a site refresh. Nothing like having all of us pounding the site simultaneously...

The server is currently well under 1% load. This increases when maps are being generated, but there's still way more than enough for even 1,000x the traffic it is getting right now.

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The only "kinks" involve your computer mistakenly loading the old page it has cached, as I did not modify index.php, only an included file. Thus your browser thinks the file has not been modified, and loads the cached version. Please try refreshing the page which still has the old navbar on it... I'll see what I can do about this later.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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