New Features on ClimbingWeather.com!

As many of you may already know, I've been working on a climbing weather site for a bit of time now called ClimbingWeather.com - climbingweather.com . The site provides up-to-date 6-day forecasts for over 300 climbing areas in the United States. The forecast data itself is aggregated from the National Weather Service, using their national digital forecast model - which is great, because it enables me to get precise latitude and longitude data.

I've recently added a few new features that might be useful to some folks:

Enhanced Search Results
Search results pages now display the 5-day forecast.

Proximity Search (by zip code)
This allows you to enter a 5-digit US zip code and get the closest 10 climbing areas returned. The distances are 'as the crow flies', not driving distances, but it can be really useful when looking for areas near a certain place (such as home or travel destination).

Monthly Averages
Most climbing areas now have observed monthly averages from the nearest National Weather Service weather station. The monthly averages include high, low, mean temperature and precipitation. Also, the site gives the name of the weather station, distance from the climbing area and elevation.

Hope you like it! I'm interested in getting more feedback and suggestions for both features and additional climbing areas. There are forms on the site for both, or you can post them here on the forum.

climbingweather.com

Thanks!

Jon

P.S. I recently posted this to the SuperTopo.com forum, so apologies if you are seeing this duplicated.

Hello Jon,

The only time I care about the Weather is when I go Climbing, I've told you this before...GREAT JOB!!

Jon,

Site looks great. Some questions:

• What is considered a 'Nice climbing day'? I don't see any indicator on the page that todays forecast is nice or not.
• Monthly averages - is the mean a measure of temp through a 24 hour period? Useful to alpine climbers, but most rock jocks don't care about nighttime lows. Feature could be to have a daytime (e.g., only use temps for hours on US Navy Sunrise/Sunset) mean temperature. Would be nice to see the same for humidity.

Joseph -

The 'Nice Climbing Day' feature is a bit experimental right now, but I want that to be one of my next features. I'm currently defining a nice climbing day as a high of 50-80 with 20% or less chance of precipitation.

I know that this will vary by climber, but it might be a cool way to get an idea of how frequently the weather is good in a particular area. I would also like to add a graph that shows the nice climbing days per week over a year. Also, these are only forecasted nice climbing days, since observations are only available at weather stations that may or may not be close to the actual area.

As for the monthly averages: the mean is the monthly average of average temperatures during all 24-hour periods in a month. Yes, you're right, it might not be as useful for the average cragger, but I think the average high might be the number to use there. If may be possible to get averages for daylight hours, but kind of difficult since I'm constrained by what the National Weather Service provides.

Anyways - thanks for the feedback!

Jon

Hey Jon

This looks great, I will make sure to start using this as my weather site! as David said "Great Job"

Rob

Jason -

You were right about Rifle. I updated it with the proper latitude and longitude, so it should be working correctly now. In the next couple of weeks, I want to link to Google maps (or provide inline maps) that show the exact coordinates that I am using.

I still need to update the distance to weather station info - will try to get that updated today. We're in the midst of a major baking fest for the New River Rendezvous that is going on out here this weekend.

Thanks for your feedback!

Jon

You should add a radar map to the report as well. It's a lot easier to see if it's going to rain or not.

Nice job! We're headed to IC this week and can never decide if we should use Monticello or Moab as our guide of how it's going to be. Tres bien!

Joh - nice work - I really like what you're doing.

I think I saw this on supertopo or something a while back and I know you only have so much time to devote to a project like this.

But is there any way to see the predictions for the time of day storms are supposed to roll in? Time of day for storms rolling in may also invert the high and low temps.

so if you wanted to dawn patrol and it looks rainy for the day, how can we find out if it'll be coming in at noon?

I'll be using your site- nice work.
clay

Clay -

Definitely hourly is key, I agree. I think that will be something I add in the next couple of weeks. The National Weather Service provides 3-hour forecasts, which I then average for the daily forecasts. All I really need to do is provide that 3-hour breakdown, and I think that would probably be sufficient for most cimbers. I think that other sites, such as Weather.com, probably just do an interpolation on the 3-hour model.

Thanks for the compliments and support! There will be a couple more features released later this week.

Jon

One other quick thought - I like the proximity search (there's always the question of whether to go to NH or the Gunks from here in Boston) but the results are cluttered with areas that I'm not going to go to. This makes it difficult to compare the various sites I'm actually interested in. Is there any way of allowing users to select which climbing areas they see, and potentially even sort them?

Coz -

I agree. I was thinking of having a way to mark areas as 'favorites' and then have a page exclusively for your favorites. That way you could pick out any areas, whether it be from proximity search or elsewhere, and always have them easily viewable.

I would say that feature is probably 3-4 weeks off, but I'll definitely keep it high on the priority list.

Jon

Here's something that would be pretty cool. It wouldn't work for every area but i happen to have a clear, line of sight view of the Cochise Stronghold from my house. I could mount a webcam (in an weather proof case of some sort) on my roof and zoom it to the mountain range then we could build a script to tftp push the images up to your site at regular intervals.

Daryl -

Sweet idea! I thought about doing that here (New River Gorge, WV), too - but don't really have a good place where you could see the rock. Definitely, if you're interested in doing this, I can setup a way to transfer the images to the server.

Jon