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.

We’re building our own ad network

If you just want to know how to advertise with us, you can head to the Advertise page on our site. If, however, you’d first (or only) like to know more about this decision of ours, read on …

As I began this post, I wrestled with a title. Something about “accepting advertising” came to mind, but falls so short of what we’re really doing. What are we doing? First, a bit of context:

By our latest estimate, building Stormpulse.com has taken over 10,000 hours stretched over 4 years time. In that time, we’ve done nothing to monetize the site except adding a Tipjoy button and later a PayPal Donate button. Those steps were a response to user demands that we have some way of making money off the site. (We felt appreciated to say the least.)

Some of you (a very, very small number) may have noticed that we took down the Donate button last Friday. This reflects a decision we’ve made: we’re going to build a network of severe weather-related advertisers from the ground up.

In keeping with the same do-it-yourself spirit that caused us to write our own Flash application code instead of co-opting Google Maps, we’re going to flip open our phones and make the calls and make the advertising connections it takes to ensure that our site never has an irrelevant ad on its pages. We can’t leave that up to a contextual algorithm.

As consumers of our own site, we really love the ad-free experience, so we’re determined to make our advertisements as content-like as possible. No fat bellies, no dancing bears, no blinking text. Many of those 10,000 hours invested in the site have been about high-quality display. We’re not going to muck it up now.

In fact, we’re building our own network so that we have a total control that will allow us to ultimately remove the line between advertising and content. What do I mean by that? Another day, another post (but yes, we have something coming). For now, know that we are looking forward to speaking with anyone that would like to advertise their product or service on our site. We have several options available, including geo-targeting.

Those of you that remain concerned should know that we’re also planning to offer an ad-free option. If that’s something you’d be interested in, please let us know.

Concerns, questions, and comments anyone? Fire away.

The 2008 hurricane season comes to a close

This past Monday marked the end of the 2008 hurricane season, and with it, the end of our first big year at Stormpulse.com.

The season ended with a total of 17 tropical depressions, 16 of which became named tropical storms, 8 of which became hurricanes, 5 of which became major (category 3 or higher) hurricanes. This made 2008 the third costliest season on record (behind 2005 and 2004), and the fourth busiest since 1944.

Hurricane Ike was the most eventful by far, landing on Galveston as ‘only’ a category 2 but nevertheless leaving a wake of destruction in its path. Gustav threatened to be worse than Katrina, but fortunately New Orleans was spared the worst and the levees held. At one point, four active storms dotted the Atlantic: Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and Josephine. And in a late-season emergence, Hurricane Paloma strengthened to a category 4 before making landfall in Cuba as a category 3 (amazingly, only 1 person lost their life as a result).

All of that activity added up to a season to remember, and a lot of visits to our site, with a lot of wonderful support, both financially (through our tip jar and Donate Now button) and verbally, as word of the site spread faster and faster. How fast was it? Well, take this example, sent to us on September 8th:

We were docked in Andros, Bahamas, waiting for Hanna to pass. The local weather, via satellite and Internet was so into Gustav that Ike was just another storm to be recconed with later. Everyone on the dock was very concerned about Ike. One of the boaters suggested we look at your site. We were able to make a decision from looking at all of the information, that was to “get outta town!”.And we did. Arrived in South Florida yesterday, feeling much safer. Thanks so much.

While this report came to us a full seven weeks after beginning our API program, we were still stunned to hear proof of the word of mouth that was transpiring. How that boater in Andros knew about our site, I have no idea. There was a time when I used to feel like I knew the core group that used Stormpulse; while that core group still does, that time is over. That core group has exploded, and the site has taken on a life of its own: it’s now owned just as much by its users as by yours truly.

Where will it go from here? Brad is in town as I write this, and for the next couple of weeks we are going to put our thoughts together and attempt to organize, filter, and boil down all of the great feedback we received this year, as well as new opportunities that have presented themselves that we’d like to attack before the 2009 season rolls around. It’s still a bit fuzzy, but it’s quickly taking shape; as soon as we have something concrete, I’ll post it here.

I’d like to also thank all of you for your wonderful support; whether you donated your visits, your time, your pennies, or your dollars, we thank you.

A few more highlights:

• Stormpulse was blogged about on Yahoo! Tech, TechCrunch, and mentioned by Tim O’Reilly during his Web2.0 Expo speech in NY on September 18th.
• Visitors came from 214 countries during the 2008 hurricane season. The United States, Canada, and the Dominican Republic were the top three.
• Direct visits accounted for approximately 70% of all web traffic to Stormpulse.com this season.
• Stormpulse.com is the #2 result on Google for ‘hurricane tracking‘, just behind the National Hurricane Center, and is the #1 result for ‘storm tracker‘ or ‘storm tracking‘.

Happy birthday: Stormpulse turns 4!

This week, Stormpulse turns four years old. The site began as a just-for-fun project in mid-September of 2004. Back then I was calling it ‘canewatch’–the name of the folder on my laptop that held all of the little PHP scripts that grabbed XML from the National Hurricane Center and parsed the massive HURDAT file containing all of the best track information back to 1851.

An excerpt from my first blog post about it, from September 21st, 2004:

National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center — my latest web project involves hurricanes. Twelve hundred of them to be exact. Well, including tropical storms. Can’t share much detail but the theme of the story is that I’m tired of the cartoon renderings that currently pass as meteorological forecasts and have embarked on a journey to bring information rich interactive displays using hurricane data to the general public. I’ve also been waking up between 4:00am and 5:30am in the morning to plug away at this, as my life with a now-nine-week old is rather full!

And another:

To supplement the quasi-dearth of creative challenge at my workplace, I’m currently coding away for what will be stormpulse.com, a real-time updating hurricane tracking site. Nothing there yet, but my PowerBook is gladly accepting a pummeling of data as I build the MySQL back-end. This is an exciting project in many ways. From a social benefits standpoint, I truly believe people deserve better than the cartoon-like graphics and information they get from their local weather service. Technologically, it’s loaded with challenges of integrating multiple data sources by fetching live feeds and simultaneously calling on the historical data that will be stored as well (all of the tracking information since 1851). For the geeks out there, it looks something like: Original input + fetched data (Cron jobs) –> [MySQL] <– PHP –> [XML] <– XML Connector –> [Flash]. Yesterday I downloaded 32,000 GPS coordinates for the state of Florida. Fun! :-D

That old personal blog also contains a few posts commenting on Hurricane Frances, the storm that most directly inspired me to write the code (my family was and still is in West Palm Beach, near Frances’ ultimate landfall). For those of you interested in startups, you may want to read more about our beginnings here at Stormpulse.com.

What have we accomplished in four years? We’ve launched a site, we’ve heard a lot of great feedback, we’ve assimilated that feedback, and we’ve received more visitors in the last three weeks than we ever thought possible.

Which brings me to a very big ‘THANKS!’ to all of you that have helped spread the word. Thank you!

Hurricane Ike sporting 105 mph winds, says Shell E&P Drilling Platform

At 2:45pm EDT, a Shell International Drilling Platform (also known as NDBC buoy 42361) recorded Hurricane Ike’s southeastern eyewall at 105 mph at a pressure of 967 mb:

Meanwhile, a buoy stationed off the southeast coast of Galveston, TX is observing 17 ft. waves with winds out of the ENE at 40 mph, gusting to almost 50 mph. Also interesting that these are 17 ft. waves coming in on a 45 ft. water depth. Pressure there is at 995 mb, a 4.6 mb drop since the last observation.