Alert banner, Feeds, and other features
Those of you who have been visiting this site for a the past few days might have noticed the alert banner at the top of the pages. While the current implementation is something that I developed a few days ago, I actually started this several weeks ago as a part of the forum that I used to have on this site.
The idea is to alert those living in or headed to Isla Mujeres, Cancun, or the Yucatan in general as to possible storm threats. I first used this back when Dolly was just a tropical wave. NHC forecasters were discussing the likelihood of the storm’s evolution and track long before the charts indicated that it would hit the Yucatan. Reading this, I thought that it would be a good idea to alert the readers of this site, so that they could start watching this storm.
Several people, some of whom live on Isla Mujeres, thanked me for giving them a bit of an early heads up to what was happening.
Believing that this was something that could be of value to the readers of this site, I decided that after taking down the message board, I would develop a new alert banner, and enhance the functionality of a weather info page that I first wrote two and a half years ago.
THE ALERT BANNER:
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green — those are the colors, depending upon the current possibility/probability of the Yucatan area being threatened by a storm.
StormCarib feed:
I put up a box on the weather page displaying a feed from that site’s forum as a part of the original page. I have now switched the feed to the main site RSS feed. This way you can read the topic title, which is a link to the StormCarib.com site, and decide if you want to go to that site to read the whole article.
ENHANCED NHC RSS FEEDS:
I’ve been given access to some experimental RSS feeds from the NHC website. These feeds, which you can now see on the weather information page, combine some of the most popular graphics on that site with text updates. This information comes directly from NHC, and is updated automatically by the them.
What is this all about:
The idea here is to provide a portal to various sources of information. You can see a collection of current graphics without leaving this site, and link to the source if you want greater detail. I plan to work more to enhance that capability in the future.
Although I have studied a lot about the weather for many years, I am not a meteorologist, and I am not pretending to be one. My interest in hurricanes began in the very early 70’s, when I was an airborne weather systems technician, assigned to an Air Weather Service Weather Reconnaissance Squadron in the USAF. I was just the guy who fixed the gear, but I also wanted to better understand the application, which I found to be fascinating, and learned as much as I could about the methodology of aerial weather reconnaissance of the day. So, no, I’m not a weather man, but I do know enough about it to be able to make more sense of the forecast discussions than perhaps the average layperson.
So, the forecast information and commentary about various storms that you will read in my blog are not my forecasts, and it is solely based on current forecast data and discussions that I have read. My goal is to net out some of the pertinent data and provide it to you in this blog. Of course, if you want more detailed information from the pros, the feeds and links are there on the weather info page.
Please enjoy using this site, and I welcome your comments.
–Bob