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cchrisfreder about 5 hours ago 2 commentsRead Article on strataweather.com

ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

I had been wanting to try experimenting with nowcasting since the death of Dark Sky and finally got around to it. This application essentially became a playground for me to experiment with various weather datasets and geospatial visualizations.

Some interesting concepts that came from it:

The nowcast is using pySTEPS optical flow under the hood: https://pysteps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/auto_examples/plot_.... This library is super cool. It bugged me that every radar visualization just gave you choppy snapshots in time, so I spent some time working on building a smooth interpolation. The backend passes keyframes along with motion data from the optical flow analysis and then has a custom WebGL shader to do the interpolation which lets you scrub the timeline and have a smooth interpolation.

The other forecast tiles and the main weather page are using the average of many different weather models. You can see every model that factors in on the models page: https://strataweather.com/models. This gives some indication of the divergence between models on the main page. Eventually I plan to score each model run and ensemble based on past performance (so you could say have a custom ensemble weight based on which models perform the best in your area). Haven't quite gotten around to that yet.

The risk pages are using the last 14 years of weather data to identify natural hazard risks as a true probability of occurrence. So it formally defines what we mean by a specific natural hazard and identifies the probability of occurrence based on past data at each location. Some of the definitions need some tweaking but it's a neat visualization.

Feel free to play around with it! It's running on a Hetzner box that I'm hoping will survive more users but we shall see!

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Discussion (2 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jmg698about 4 hours ago
It looks really cool! I thought I had an issue when I first clicked the bottom right play button, but I was just too far zoomed out. I wonder if you could have a longer play back so you could see movement easier when it's farther out.

I do like how it's just an open map and you can zoom in whereever you want really easily (i'm on my mac desktop).

chrisfrederabout 4 hours ago
Ahh, yea, it is set to do 2 hour forecasts for precipitation because the optical flow based nowcasting really drops off in accuracy beyond that. I probably should default it to be more zoomed in so there is more motion. Thanks for trying it out!