Station Notes

Daily high / low temperature added to home page

We recently had some record high temperatures, and I noticed that my record script did not pop up. The script only displays record high and lows for the year. Since station records only go back to June 2005, daily records could pop up too often. So, to see how close to a record the temperature is, I decided to add a tool tip to display the record high and low. I thought that I would put it on today's Max / Min, but that was showing yesterday's actual high and low, and I did not want to do away with that. The Word Current has the weather description as a tool tip, so I did not want to change that, either. So I put it on the average high and low. Hover the cursor over the word Averages, under the Temperature field on the home page, to see the station records high and low for the day.

Atlantic storm page updated
I added an interactive map from Stormpulse.com to the Hurricane Page. It is very nice, check it out!

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.