Hello,
First, I want to give much thanks to the many members of wxforum that have contributed ever so helpful PHP scripts. These scripts along with Ken's wonderful templates give you such a great start at building a seriously informative weather website. Great work, everyone. And, again much thanks.
http://weatherola.comWeatherOLA is a weather focused website who's first purpose is to provide weather information for our community of Indianola, Washington. It's the first reporting station for our small community and the larger area that's referred to as West Sound that's directly west of Seattle. We see the weather before Seattle does.
The site has been up for nearly two years now and thanks to the Saratoga templates the original site was quick and easy to build. I've modified some of the templates to change some layouts to suit my particular needs. I'm using a Davis Vantage Pro2 and WeatherDisplay software on the primary site.
Over the first year, I kept expanding and expanding the site and over the last 11 months I always felt I needed to do more. So, I've put particular emphasis on one section of the weatherola.com website. And, that's my weather cam setup. I wanted something special both in terms of the quality of the images produced, but also in terms of the visual composition and the weather images that would be captured.
Because I couldn't get what I was after at my home's forested location, I looked around our community for several months and found the perfect location to observe the prominent weather patterns for Puget Sound that would also give me the tight visual composition I was after. The camera setup and a second reporting weather station (the weather is different there) and a second weather server are about a mile from my house. It's located on a high bank bluff above the water facing in the direction of the primary weather patterns we see for western Washington. As a result, I'm able to capture high resolution stills and hidef time lapse videos of the day's weather. The weathercam setup is an Olympus SP-500UZ camera in a custom housing, run by a separate onsite server running sebectec.com camera control software. The second onsite weather station and server are all controlled remotely. In addition, there's multiple image/video feeds coming from the server. A special high resolution website setup designed for broadcast quality TV is feeding directly into all the Seattle area network affiliates' broadcast weather servers. The stills and time lapse videos are regularly shown and I think it's helping to show Puget Sound how weather can dramatically change in a short time in the Seattle area.
It's all been a lot of fun learning about the weather, weather stations, weather cameras and all the wonderful scripts that people have contributed. I can't thank the members of this forum enough for all your help in developing my interest in meteorology. It seems I'm never done with the site and keep adding to it and hope to be adding much more to make it a better and more informative in the future.
Tim
http://weatherola.com
