Free accounts, new plans at Stormpulse

As Tropical Storm Ida was rapidly intensifying, we were rapidly putting the finishing touches on a new release of Stormpulse.

Please welcome Stormpulse Free.  With a free account:

• We automatically keep track of your preferences in the layers menu, so you don’t have to keep turning your layers of interest on and off.
• You can add 1 custom map label to the map.  You can set one by browsing to your city using our severe weather maps, or by entering the latitude and longitude manually in the account screen ‘Manage Locations’.

We’ll continue to add free services to these free accounts, so sign up and stay tuned!

Other changes to the site:

• In addition to monthly subscriptions, we now offer 6-month (perfect for storm season) and 12-month plans (for storm tracking all year-round with our severe weather maps).  This was a popular request, so here you have them.  Monthly subscriptions are still $3.95/mo., and the 6-month and 12-month plans are discounted by 1-month and 2-months repectively ($19.95 for 6 months, $39.95 for the full year).
• Performance improvements–we reduced the amount of data that loads initially by making some of our files smaller.
• We auto-sense your location on our severe weather page.  Look for “Your Location” on the left.  This is not 100% accurate, but we believe it’s a step in the right direction for the Stormpulse experience.

We hope you find these updates useful and enjoyable to use.  As always, please let us know what you think.

Nationwide severe weather on Stormpulse

This morning we updated the site to include most of the severe weather watches and warnings published by the National Weather Service (weather.gov).

This includes many, many types of hazards such as:

• Severe Thunderstorms
• Tornadoes
• Floods & flash floods
• Fire watches/warnings
• Winter storms (snow, sleet)
• Frosts/freezes
• Extreme heat

Here’s an example of some frost creeping into Charlotte, NC this morning:

We’ve adopted the same colors as the official NWS charts (though that may change), and we’ve added value (in our Stormpulse way) by making the areas clickable, by joining together neighborhoring shapes into a single area (less clutter, less confusion) when they share the same advisory/alert, and by giving you access to the complete description right inside the map.

Along with the mapping visuals, you’ll also notice we have a search box that supports searching by state, city, or zip code.

Example searches: “Memphis, TN“, “33411“, “New York, NY“, “Minnesota“, “California“, “FL“.

Play around and have fun with it, and let us know what you think.  We are considering this very much an early version (‘beta’ in developer lingo), so beware of hidden bugs and potential performance issues if you are using a slower computer.

Stormpulse Advanced: the better way to track tropical weather

After many, many hours of conversation (with you) and coding (in relative isolation), we’re excited to release our new friend, Stormpulse Advanced, into the wild.

The initial feature set (shown in the screencast above):

Satellite Loops. 12-hour loops using three different kinds of imagery: rainbow, water vapor, and true color.  I’m particularly fond of the true color, as we attempted to blend it as seamlessly with the Stormpulse map as possible.  These loops not only animate, but can be told to auto-repeat in sync.  If you love the way our big blue marble looks from space, I think you’ll love this too.

Auto-refresh. Just click this option On in the layers menu and the Stormpulse page will refresh automatically every 5 minutes.  Especially handy when using Stormpulse as an continuous information display during active times of the season.  This works in full-screen mode as well (counter placed in the page title bar).

Save-my-preferences. No longer do you have to turn this layer on and turn that one off each and every time you load the map.  Turn a layer off and it stays off.  Turn it on, and it stays on.  No need to set up anything in an admin interface–our site learns your preferences as you use the map, no configuration required.

Ad-free experience. The free verion of Stormpulse is supported by advertisements, but advertisements are neither displayed nor loaded in Stormpulse Advanced.

Want to see more? Here’s another screencast I recorded this morning, showing Stormpulse Advanced’s satellite loops in action.

We hope you’re as interested in signing up as we are exhausted.  In any event, we’d love to hear from you.  Feel free to let us know what you think!

You should follow us on twitter here.

3 hour site outage on July 6th at 7:00AM EDT

"Power Outage 11" by nateOne (flickr)

Last night we upgraded the site on into the early hours of the morning, and during this time experience some difficulties keeping the map on Stormpulse.com stable. Maps accessed through the API also went black during this time. Meanwhile, network errors outside of our control began to make the site unusable. Things were monitored until they returned to normal at approximately 10:00AM EDT.

As always, thanks for visiting Stormpulse, and bearing with us as we continue to improve the service (and experience growing pains along the way).

Hola, aloha: Stormpulse expands to the Pacific basin

Please note: the full-screen view and the Stormpulse API do not yet work for the Pacific basin.  We are working to resolve this in the near future.  Update: Our embeddable maps now work for the Pacific basin.  Our API instructions have been updated to show you how.

One of the most popular requests we received last year was for us to broaden our coverage from the Atlantic to the Pacific basin.

So, after rolling up our sleeves in the off-season, we quietly launched our coverage of the Eastern Pacific basin on May 15th (coinciding with the 1st day of the Eastern Pacific season).

We’ve added storm information back to 1949, buoy reports, wind probabilities, and satellite imagery.  Something we don’t have yet: forecast/spaghetti models.  Our source for the Atlantic spaghetti models (the South Florida Water Management District) does not provide this data, so we’re looking for a source.  If you know where we can get fairly clean text data for model tracks in the Eastern Pacific, let us know!

Additionally, you can get automatic updates on changes in Eastern Pacific Basin storms via our Stormpulse Pacific twitter account: @stormpulsepac.

Hope all of your out west and out in the big blue sea find this helpful.  Send us your feedback when you get a chance (and let us know where can find spaghetti model info if you happen to know!).

New Stormpulse customer survey

(Not to be confused with the survey we were doing for Stormpulse Advanced, which is now closed).

Take it here.  Just 7 questions and very quick, depending on how much you want to write.  Please?

Survey Marker by blmurch (flickr)

10 minute site outage on June 3rd at 2:45PM EDT

By Neeta Lind (Flickr)

As you may already know, our site was down for 5-10 minutes yesterday afternoon.

We investigated the root cause and traced it back to some database enhancements that we made this winter, after the last hurricane season.  This portion of our database system is responsible for the cities you see on our tracking map, so in addition to the map being unavailable, you may have noticed the cities were missing for a larger stretch.

We’ve taken three specific steps (I’ll spare you the gory details) to prevent this from re-occurring in the future, and we appreciate your patience as we grow.

Still free: Stormpulse freemium explained

Over the last month we’ve received hundreds of responses to the Stormpulse Advanced survey. Many of those responses included comments: everything from suggestions to praise to constructive criticism. Any time someone left an email address, we tried to take the conversation further, to learn just how they used the site in 2008, and what features they like the best (what brings them back). Even in the off-season, the response has been great, and we’re honored that so many people are turning to Stormpulse for their severe weather-tracking needs.

But sprinkled throughout those hundreds of responses were a few comments that made us cringe. The painful part? Each of them thought that ‘free Stormpulse’ would be going away. So first, let me apologize for not communicating more clearly. We should have had a better way of letting all of you know that the site is not going to a pay-only format. All of the features you used to track Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and Paloma will be around in 2009, and then some (we have many, many new additions in mind), just as free as ever.

So what’s happening? We’re building what we’re calling Stormpulse Advanced. These will be premium, paid accounts. So we’ve been asking all of you out there what features you’d like to see in a premium account, so we can build the product you want us to build. So far the clear winners are radar loops and animation and historical details on forecasts. Close behind are things like sea surface temperatures, hurricane hunter data, and the ability to save preferences. Not surprisingly, a number of folks are also interested in no advertising (although some folks actually want advertising, as long as it’s tasteful and relevant, which of course it would be).

So if you’re out there and someone tells you that they heard that Stormpulse isn’t going to be free, please do us and them a favor and kindly let them know that we plan to be here for all of you in 2009, just as we were last year.

As always, thanks for your support and feedback.

Follow @stormpulse on twitter

Stormpulse is on twitter. We’ll be broadcasting brief updates on new company developments and storm activity. If you take a look at the right-hand column of this blog, you’ll see our last 5 tweets.

Stormpulse Advanced survey

Want to help shape our future? Then head over to our site and click the ‘Help Stormpulse, take our survey!‘ link in the top-right-hand corner.

We’re looking to add advanced accounts with premium features to our site, and we’d appreciate your frank input.