Spaghetti served fresh: Forecast models on the Stormpulse.com map

This morning we launched a new release of our interactive map and website software.

Features and bugfixes:

• Added forecast (spaghetti) models to the map. (See below)
• Added a “Full-Screen“ link from home page to display the map at 100% width and 100% height. You can find it at the top-right (above the tracking map).
• Added hurricane category to the summary box. Now the title of the box will be “Hurr. (H2) Gustav, +120 hours” rather than just “Hurr. Gustav, +120 hours”. The H2 means a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
• Pressure text was being chopped off occasionally in the summary box at the bottom of the map.
• Fixed incorrect times (e.g. “+12 hours”) when clicking on points in the NHC forecast cone. This is now fixed to show the correct time difference between the latest coordinate and the time of the forecast position.
• Removed meaningless latitude, longitude locations from the Gulf of Mexico. These were just serving as placeholders for Wind Probabilities and add no value to the display.

SPAGHETTI MODELS FEATURE

To activate the models view, select an active tropical depression, tropical storm, or hurricane and click Forecast Models: ‘On’ in the layers menu at the top-right of the map. After a brief pause (while the data is retrieved from our server), you should be greeted with a view that looks something like this (in this example, for Tropical Storm Hanna):

Click anywhere along a model’s forecast track to see the name of the model, projected position, time, and pressure (if available). Hovering over any of the points along the model’s forecast track will expose a small pop-up box that tells you the geeky acronym of the model–things like XTRP (extrapolated path if the storm continues its current trajectory), GFDL (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab), BAMD (Beta and Advection Model – Deep), etc.

To view the models for Tropical Storm Gustav, click “GUSTAV” and repeat the same step (“On” in the Forecast Models: toggle).

The data for the forecast models comes from the South Florida Water Management District, with the colors for the various paths matching the color scheme they use for their own spaghetti maps.

A special note to all of our API affiliates: we have been receiving emails lately asking how to “get a new map” for Gustav or Hanna. The simple answer is to change “current” in your URL to “tropical-storm-gustav-2008” or “tropical-storm-hanna-2008”. This will ensure that the map automatically focuses on the desired storm. More examples available here.

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