Station Notes

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Earth Hour 2010 will take place on March 27, 2010 from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm, local time. This will be the third year for NH PA Weather.

Earth Hour support has definitely grown in the US! From the FAQ:
• In 2009, hundreds of millions of people in more than 4,000 cities in 87 countries on seven continents participated. In the U.S., 80 million Americans, 318 cities and eight states officially turned off their lights for Earth Hour including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City and San Francisco.

From the Wiki:
Reports show that the United States topped the Earth Hour participation with an estimated 80,000,000 people, 318 cities and 8 states participating. The Philippines saw participation from 647 cities and towns or over 15 million Filipinos were estimated to have joined in the hour-long lights-off at 8:30 - 9:30 PM local time. This was followed by Greece with 484 cities and towns participating, and Australia with 309.

Please join NH PA Weather in turning out the lights, from 8:30 to 9:30, on March 27!

This is a nice web page by Weather Underground. It is a mesomap with Google maps and Weather Underground data. It has a toolbar at the top to personalize to your liking. I found the default settings to be best for my liking, but it's fun to explore. You can view New Holland here, or select a different locale here.

Well, I had no idea how to even measure the amount this time, but here is what people reported to the NWS:
Lititz 22.0 541 PM 2/10
Eden 20.0 520 PM 2/10 Manheim TWP.
Goodville 20.0 830 PM 2/10
Millersville 19.0 656 PM 2/10
Manheim 16.0 100 PM 2/10
New Holland 16.0 230 PM 2/10
Rothsville 15.7 120 PM 2/10
Lancaster 15.0 700 PM 2/10
Someone else had reported 17" for New Holland.

I uploaded some images from this storm. You can see how nasty it looked during the storm. Look at the depth at the birdbath. My car wasn't spared this time.

There is another storm headed this way, but the prediction is for it to stay to the South of us. But Tuesday's forecast is for more snow!

This sounds like an easy question! Walk out, stick tape in snow, read tape. As soon as I walked out the door I knew it wouldn't be so easy. The brick patio at the bottom of my steps was clear. Also, an area of a couple feet surrounding my car was bare. The rest of the driveway had a couple of feet. No problem, I'll walk across the street to the large field, measure it there. I didn't expect to see drifting in the field, but there are a couple of trees in the field, near the street, and the area around their base was clear. So I continued on to the soccer field. I know this to be mostly level. I measured a couple of places and found the depth to be from 14 to 15 inches. So I called it 14 1/2 inches. Later, I found a page on the NWS with snow depths. This is what they offered:
...LANCASTER COUNTY...
MILLERSVILLE 24.5 1216 PM 2/6
MANHEIM 22.0 908 AM 2/6
MARIETTA 21.0 727 AM 2/6
LANCASTER 20.0 804 AM 2/6
LEOLA 18.0 909 AM 2/6
SAFE HARBOR DAM 18.0 700 AM 2/6
ROTHSVILLE 17.5 820 AM 2/6
NEW HOLLAND 17.2 700 AM 2/6
MOUNT NEBO 17.0 845 AM 2/6
EPHRATA 15.5 835 AM 2/6
I really do not think that we had 17 inches in New Holland, but what do I know? We had a bunch, is all I do know.

I uploaded some pics from the web cams. This one is from Friday night, the camera is starting to frost over. You can see the bare area around my car here. This one is a general snow shot. Here you can see the wind blowing the snow around. Finally, a shot from the bird cam.

I received an email from Skip informing me that, Weathercam 2 was offline. This happens from time to time, especially when the camera's IP changes. If you notice that it is offline, please drop me a line. There is a contact page linked at the bottom of the home page, and most others. I know it is a pain doing the captchas, but they are a necessity. You can skip that by sending a message to dave at nhpaweather dot com. I do get mail from people that use the camera, especially when the weather is bad, and I appreciate hearing that, so please don't hesitate to tell me when it is down. To get an image from the camera, click here, and to get the feed, click here.

I have updated the Storm Prediction Center page. The script is by Curly, with the discussion here. Look under the Advisories menu to see my page, or click here.

I added a new iphone page. I already had a wap page, but this one seems 'neater'. You can see the discussion here, and view my page here.

I changed the 7 day forecast page to include the pictorial forecast from yr.no.
"yr.no is the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation." View my page here.

We had quite a storm here, yesterday! The station only recorded .44 liquid equivalent, which is about half of what I think we received. A fellow weather enthusiast reported 13" of snow for New Holland. With the way it was blowing all around the house, I really did not know the best spot to measure, so I will agree with that amount. The web site received a record 75 unique visitors. I don't count the 105 recorded once, we won't talk about that.

New WXSIM Hourly Forecast CSV Script
I added a script to display the Wxsim forecast in an hourly manner. I really like this display! You can view it here. See the regular format WXSIM forecast. If you wish to add it to your web site, you can download it here.

WXSIM is a forecast generated by NH PA Weather. It rivals the National Weather Service in accuracy.

edit- The picture is now clickable.

Back in August, I had written a simple script to calculate the snowfall equivalency from the melt in the rain gage. Today I finally got a chance to see if it works. It didn't! It showed snowfall as equal to the melt in the rain gage. I changed the script, for this temperature it should be 10 X the melt. This is based on the chart here. This is only an approximation, the actual amount of snowfall can be much more, or much less. The script only shows up when the temp is below 34.1. Look for the results of the script on the home page, under the rain section.

Weather Display now has 3D charts! I added a page with the monthly rainfall vs the average chart. You can see it here. You can also find it on the charts menu, it is the bottom item. There is another chart that I like, but it does not show all the data that it is supposed to. It should show the difference between this year's temps and last year's. I will add it to the menu, if Windy ever corrects it. You can view the .gif here.

About New Holland Weather
I found a system status script, and thought it worthwhile to add to my site. I believe that it was originally written by the folks at Southern Maryland Weather. Ken True made a version available on the wxforum. I added the status script to the About page, and updated some of the info there. I am playing with the idea of adding the individual status entries to the pages where their data is shown.

Pictorial Forecast
There is a new, way pictorial, way to display forecasts, and was mentioned in both weather forums that I follow. I really like it, and was trying to decide whether or not to create a separate page for it. It does take awhile to load, so I decided to put it on the Extended Forecast page. (You have to scroll down to see it.) If you click on it, you will go full screen. (Hit [escape] to exit full screen.) In full screen mode, you can scroll through the forecast using the scroll on your mouse, or by clicking on the days under the picture. I also have this on my facebook page. If you are friends with someone else that has this on facebook, you can see their forecast by looking out their window.
user3162


If you wish to become friends with me, please mention WEATHER.

edit- Oops Forgot to mention the web site to get the forecast app. From there, you can add to your facebook page, download a screen saver or add to your web page.

edited again Fixed the link to the extended forecast page

Tom Ehrensperger has added a 'nudge' factor to WXSIM. I still consider the forecasts as experimental, but I have not seen any forecast out of line.

Jim McMurry has written a Forecast Comparison script, which compares the WXSIM forecast with the National Weather service, to see which is closer. Tom asked Jim if he could include the 'net error' in the script, to see if the forecast was higher or lower than predicted.

Ken True has added an RSS feed to the WXSIM forecast.

So I added the improvements. The WXSIM forecast is here, you will find the RSS link on that page, or here, and the comparison script is here.

I have been looking at the GR3 pages from various members on the Weather Watch forum. I noticed that most used the Composite radar image as the default. I had been using Base Reflectivity, and was curious as to what the difference was. I found this "Base reflectivity only shows reflected energy at a single elevation scan of the radar. Composite reflectivity displays the highest reflectivity of ALL elevations scans" from NOAA. There is a lot of info on that page, it is worth a look. So I started uploading the Composite radar image for the State College radar site, and set it as the default. Looking at the other options available, I decided to upload the Storm Relative Radial Velocity, and the Storm Rain images. Storm Rain is pretty much self explanatory, but for a better definition of Storm relative radial velocity, look here. For now, I will add only those images, and limit the Dover radar image to Base Reflectivity. I have a very limited upload speed, as you may know from watching any of the live cams, so I don't want to go and clog things up completely.

Chart Menus
I have been checking the error log, looking for anyone trying to access the HW3.php page. I consider anyone that does, a hacker, and block their whole IP range. Anyway, I noticed a problem with the menus on the Open Flash chart pages. I have to make these menus separate from all the other pages. I hope I have them all sorted, now.

PC Security
Sort of off topic, but... With my attention on securing the web site, I thought I would take a look at my PC.
MBAM, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is an anti-spyware program that will block rouge IPs on your PC.
Secunia Personal Software Inspector checks your installed software for known exploits.
In addition to these, I use Superantispyware.

They do not recommend using more than one anti-virus program. I know everyone has their own idea of what is the best anti-virus, so I will just say, I use the free version of AVG.

I have PHP scripts which accept URL line input. Of course the bad guys try to take advantage. I looked at ways to limit this, without slowing down the page load time. So far, the best way that I found was to use .htaccess and filter out countries by IP. I know this is like trying to kill a mosquito with a sledge hammer, but if it takes heavy handed tactics, then it takes heavy handed tactics.

I started off blocking Korea, since it was the worst, followed by Russia. I constantly had crawlers on my site from China, so I decided to add them, too. Why would someone in China care about the weather in New Holland, anyway? I don't know that I've seen anyone from any of those countries post to the weather forums that I follow.

This method added hundred of lines to the .htaccess file, but that means nothing to the server. Since I started doing this, I have seen no attempts at the URL input hijack. To set this up, go to http://www.blockacountry.com/ which is easy enough to remember. Select the country(s) you want to block, and it generates the .htaccess file for you.

I could not get my animated GR3 page to load in I.E. After looking at it, I decided to try Ken True's version included with the templates. Works fine, see it here.

edit- After looking at the GR3 radar page some more, I decided to animate the Dover radar, as well. I could not put both radar sites on the same page, without making major changes to Ken's script. I ended up making two separate pages, one for the State College page, and one for the Dover page. They each have the latest radar image from each site, with the ability to animate one of them.

I have updated the advisories page and the top warning script, which runs on the other pages. These updates are by Mike Challis. The top warning now includes an icon, but otherwise looks the same. The look on the advisories page has changed, for the better, I think! It also includes a key to the icons used in the top warning. The last time I looked these scripts were not on Mike's script page, but you can find them, and the discussion, on Weather Watch. Top warning is here, and the advisory page is here.

What the heck?? Two posts in one week! As I said, I have time on my hands, now. I AM trying to get some work done around the house, but I have to sit down and play with the web site, too! So I found a post in the wxforum, about estimating snowfall, based on the amount melted in the rain gage. There is a chart mentioned in that thread here. It is based entirely on the air temperature. I tried my hand at writing a PHP script to estimate and display the snowfall equivalency. I added it to the home page, but it will only display a message when the temperature is below 34° F. Since we are in the Summer now, you won't see anything. The script isn't perfect, it estimates the snowfall based on the current temperature, which is not necessarily the same temperature during the snowfall. Still, it is better than using a fixed conversion amount.