SLOweather on the news

[SLOweather]

Thursday night we had one of the most spectacular lightning displays in years.

Lightning is a rarity around San Luis Obispo, CA, and the storm we had was very Midwestern, except for the lack of rain.

Apparently, the weather guy on the local early morning TV news mentioned SLOweather and my lightning tracker. Around 8AM, I received an interview request through the SLOweather contact page, and by 10:30, the field reporter and cameraman were here at our house interviewing me.

The lead story on both the 5 and 6 PM news was the lightning storm, and SLOweather was on the tail end of both, first for 30 seconds, and at 6 for a minute or so.

As soon as I can get clean copies from the station, I'll put them up on my site.

[up10ad]

Congrats Chris!    Lightingin and rain were the two things I missed the most when I was in Bakerssfield for 28 years.  Can't wait to see the interview.

[Mark / Ohio]

Congratulations!  

Let us know when you get the video up.

[kray1000]

It even made our local newscast here in Roanoke.  All night long, huh??  Geez...

Saw some pretty good film of it, too.

[Anthony]

Again, congratulations Chris. That must be a great feeling to get featured on your local news. Please let us know when you get the pictures and or video posted on your web site.

[SLOweather]

It even made our local newscast here in Roanoke.  All night long, huh??  Geez...

Saw some pretty good film of it, too.

If you saw it on an NBC affiliate, that footage was from KSBY. They have a very cool hilltop studio location in the same hills as our home, 2 miles away. The STL microwave dishes are hidden in the cupola on top.



It overlooks US 101 and the south part of town, and they shoot a lot of their weather footage right from the balcony. The location used to be a restaurant.

The lightning started here about 7:30 PM and lasted until at least 2:30 or 3 AM. Not always intense, but always a flash visible at least every minute or 2. It was closeset in the early morning, and the surrounding mountains caused the thunder to echo and resonate for an extended period of time.

Chalk it up to a cutoff low that hovered over our area for a couple of days. We even saw a couple of strikes over the ridge about 8 miles away on Friday afternoon when we were out tubbin'.

[tbweather]

Congratulations Chris. It would be interesting to know if the "advertising" of your website on the evening news has any appreciable effect on the number of visitors your website receives.

One of the meteorologists at a TV station about 75 miles from me has used weather data and webcam captures from my website in his weather segments several times (including displaying the URL on the screen) but I didn't notice any discernable jump in the number of visitors.

It would be interesting to know what your experience is.

[SLOweather]

It's hard to tell how much of the bump came from the news, and how much from the storm. My stats always go up when the weather gets bad in the winter, and down in the summer when it's uniformly nice here.

Here are the SLOweather stats from USA Weather Finder for the last week. Note that this is a jpg. Copy and paste didn't format well. The 13th is the day after the storm:



Here's a plot of hits by date:



Unfortunately, I can't think of a way, at this point, to measure bumps after the morning and evening news. I think it's too late.

OTOH, I continue to hear from friends and  acquaintances that saw me on the news, plus a couple of hits on my SLOweather contacts page from people that don't know me that saw it.

[capeweather]

Congrats Chris for making the news. My stats are just the opposite for summer months and fairly slow during the winter. You can see the trend for the last 12 months and notice a steady decline in traffic. It makes sense though since the winters are really nice here and summer usually produces bad weather (lightning, rain).

http://www.capeweather.com/advstats.html

Chris

[SLOweather]

Here's a screen grab of a hits bump from USA Weather Finder for the Makakilo, HI site this week:



That huge increase in hits must be due to the earthquake.

[kray1000]

I've had a lot of people checking out my earthquake pages this week.

[tbweather]

Nothing like a natural disaster or really bad weather to pump up the hit count. Some of you have all the luck- earhtquakes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, really cold or hot weather, etc.

I may end up being sorry I said this, but: we don't get earhquakes; we get only about 30 inches of precipitation a year; we don't get serious flooding; by the time the occasional Gulf Coast hurricane reaches here, it's a brisk wind and light rain; we are on the wrong side of the State for serious lake-effect snow; our last tornado was 50 years ago; proximity to Lake Huron usually keeps it from getting really hot or really cold.

O.K., maybe fewer hits and nice weather isn't so bad after all....