Our exceptionally unexceptional February continues with very little in the way of weather. After a mild, but dull, day today we’ll be back to sunshine and seasonal to slightly above seasonal temperatures.
A very weak upper trough is moving over the region today, bringing with it cloud and a slight chance of flurries. The risk is greatest in areas south of the Trans-Canada Highway, from The Brandon/Pilot Mound regions eastwards into the Whiteshell. SLRs are expected to climb up to 15:1 to 20:1 range, so some areas closer to the US Border or into the Whiteshell may see as much as 2cm of snow. It’s unlikely that Winnipeg will see even 1cm of snow today.
The rest of the week will be sunny with daytime highs near -3°C and overnight lows near -10°C. There’s a slight chance of some snow on the latter half of the weekend, but we’ll leave that for discussing on Friday.
Updates to the Mobile Site
Some of you may be familiar with the U of M Weather Central: Mobile site that I maintain. Well, (in a Professor Farnsworth voice)…
Good news, everybody!
I’m working on updating the site as we speak. It’s no small task, as it’s a pretty comprehensive site, but I’m working on making it better than ever! A task which doesn’t seem too difficult, given I made the old one (which serves its purpose adequately) while learning how to code. Anyways, here are my goals for the redesign:
- Utilize the latest mobile technologies to provide a modern, compelling experience that is well-supported across the mobile space (iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7).
- Improve the page layout and design to visually group information better and to provide quick access to all available information.
- Utilize responsive design so that the page layout will optimize itself for phones, iPads, or desktop computers!
- Fix long-standing bugs from the old code (incorrect forecast icons, among others).
- Enhance existing features. One example is that the site now uses the sunrise and subset times of a city to calculate when to change from daytime to nighttime imagery.
- Broaden Canada-wide support.
- New features! Mobile model viewer! Mobile satellite Viewer! Mobile RADAR viewer! And more!
These are the main goals. The biggest hurdle is moving everything from a pure PHP solution to a tightly integrated jQuery/PHP solution. I plan on developing what will essentially be APIs to retrieve the data and provide a JSON-encoded response. What does that mean? The site will be fast, versatile, and standards-compliant. I also plan on making the .PHP files public so that people can easily access select Environment Canada data in a practical, modern way.
I think this new site will be really great and hands down the number-one way to get weather data on the go (and hopefully it’ll be good enough you’ll use it at home too!).
