Quick Links: Project Website | Source Code on Github I recently published an interactive map that shows the current US Drought Monitor levels and the 5-day National Weather Service Quantified Precipitation Forecast (QPF). As stated on the site, "by overlaying these two datasets, you can analyze where drought conditions may improve or worsen over the next 5 days." Background As of Sept. 8, 2016, all of Massachusetts was under some level of drought or dryness There were two primary reasons that led to the creation of this site. The first is that I had been reading about the Mapbox GL JS framework and wanted some sort of project I could build using it. Secondly, living in eastern Massachusetts, I was well aware of the worsening drought that has gripped the state for effectively the past 2 years. While attending a Maptime Boston meetup back in July where there was a discussion about intersecting and overlaying different datasets, I came up with the idea to create this product. Technical Details The US National Weather Service provides a significant cache of its products in common geographic formats. They provide their QPF formats in both Shapefile/KML (vector) and GRIB2 (raster) formats, so it's...

As seems to always be the case when it comes to my personal website, it was a bit of a journey to get to this newly-relaunched site. Real life gets complicated - there are certainly many days when after spending a full workday solving programming problems, there's just not much energy to jump right back into "creation" mode. Whether that means designing the site or blogging. Hopefully I can at least make more of an effort on the latter part going forward now that the programming work is mostly settled! I've owned thecloudonline.net since 2010 (right before graduating high school) but have maintained a site under that "name" since a few years before that. The original site featured an actual weekly forecast page I would write for my hometown, in addition to weather related articles (relevant for high schoolers, like "Are we going to get a snow day?"). In 2010, I relaunched the site and dropped the forecast section (I did link to the new home for my forecasts, the Penn State Campus Weather Service. I wrote a handful of articles over the years about different, mostly weather-related, topics which have been "reprinted" here. As I'm now into my...

This post was originally published on psuchase.org. Generally, severe weather season in Pennsylvania occurs later in the year than it does out in the Plains and other parts of the country, with the peak of severe weather season usually occurring in mid- to late-June, climatologically speaking. However, if there's one day of the year when memorable damaging weather seems most common in Pennsylvania, that day would be May 31. Here's a sample of four severe weather events that have all occurred, mostly in Western Pennsylvania, on May 31sts. 1889: Johnstown Flood Today marks the 125th anniversary of one of Pennsylvania's most historic and notable disasters - the Johnstown flood (known locally as the Great Flood of 1889). A large storm had dumped nearly 6 to 10 inches of rain, the previous day according to the US Army Signal Corps (still responsible for a large portion of meteorological observations in the 1880s). The rain overnight was enough to cause severe localized flooding, with the Conemaugh River to already nearly overcome its banks by daybreak. Meanwhile, 14 miles upstream, local residents were concerned by the amount of water that almost overwhelming the South Fork Dam. They worked throughout the morning to...

This post was originally published on psuchase.org Ever since I was a young boy, I have been fascinated by severe weather. Growing up, I watched several "storm chase" videotapes, as well as the movie Twister and other specials that would appear on television. I especially loved the show Storm Chasers on the Discovery Channel. It is through this passion for storms that got me to the point where I'm now webmaster for the Penn State Storm Chase Team. Up until Friday, most knew that storm chasing was an incredibly dangerous activity, but no major losses of life had occurred directly during a storm chase. We knew on Friday that a Weather Channel chase vehicle had been flung by a tornado far from the road, but that no major injuries had occurred. This prompted a discussion about the dangers of storm chasing on Saturday. Then, the news of the Twistex team hit. Going to bed Saturday night, rumors were swirling that tornado research legend Tim Samaras had perished storm chasing on Friday. This news was sadly confirmed overnight. He died in the El Reno, OK Friday night alongside his son Paul and their longtime chase partner Carl Young. The rest...

Note: This article has been minorly edited from its original form to remove some stale links and reformat some of the other media on the page. It seems as though tornadoes just can't stay out of the news, as of late. Cable news stations were abuzz Tuesday night and Wednesday showing the latest dramatic pictures and videos from the latest tornado outbreak, this time centered near Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. The especially notable video from yesterday's event was of tractor-trailers being thrown around into the air as if they were empty cardboard boxes! There were two other interesting things to note about yesterday’s event. First, for a decently long period of time, there were two concurrent supercells on the Dallas/Fort Worth radar, both of which contained sharp hook echoes, indicative of possible tornado development. Twin supercells with sharp hook signatures on radar, one near Ft. Worth and one near Dallas http://t.co/H0e0l3WL #tornado— Stu Ostro (@StuOstro) April 3, 2012 It appears that the majority of the damage came from the eastern storm, which had a longer period of time to exist on its own before becoming absorbed into the main frontal squall (see Figure 1)...