In my constant search for free weather data for Spincloud, a short while ago I have found a gem: free forecast data offered by the progressive Norwegian Meteorologic Institute. The long range forecast coverage is fairly thorough and covers most more than 2700 locations worldwide. I am happy to announce that I have extended spincloud.com to include it.

The data is refreshed every hour and the forecast range is available for the next seven days. You can bookmark any location or subscribe to weather reports via RSS.
On a different but related note, I can only be thankful for the free data offered by various meteorological organizations that allows Spincloud to exist and I believe in freeing public data (weather related and otherwise) as it belongs to the public that finances government and inter-government agencies in the first place. The Norwegian Met Institute is a great example for freeing its data and I am saluting them for making the right decision.
Now if only all such progressive Meteorological institutes around the world would agree on a common format for disseminating their data, it would make developers like me a tad happier…

It took a while since the previous feature update to Spincloud. I have done a number of upgrades to the underlying tech and some intensive code refactoring but nothing visible. The time has come for another eye candy: heat maps. It is a map overlay that shows a color-translated temperature layer based on interpolated values of the current weather conditions. It gives a quick indication of the average temperature across all land masses where data is available.

Naturally in areas where data is more dense, the visual representation is better. The toughest job was to figure-out the interpolation math. I still have to refine the algorithm currently based on the inverse distance weighting algorithm which interpolates scattered points on a surface. Apparently a better one to use is kriging but I have yet to implement it.
The temperature map is generated from current temperatures and is updated once every hour. You can toggle the overlay by clicking the “Temp” button found on the top of the active map area.

I launched Spincloud on New Year’s day. I didn’t expect a flood of traffic to hit the site since -let’s face it- there was nothing groundbreaking. Spincloud was born from my idea of having access to the world weather in one step or less and I’m pleased with the results so far. Spincloud gains adoption every day and this is only due to the people that saw something new and exciting in it. There are blog posts, traffic graphs and other goodies to talk about so let’s begin.

I announced spincloud’s launch on my personal blog then Keir from googlemapsmania broke the news to the community. And so the first spike of traffic was logged on Jan 2nd. 

Then followed a month of relative silence during which I took a much needed break from the project. I couldn’t help but refactoring and cleaning-up the code a bit. I had two minor releases deployed in prod in the mean time and everything went smooth.

I had a new feature I wanted to have online before the initial release, the meteoalarm mashup that displays weather warnings across Europe but chose not to delay it (a Good Decision in hindsight) . I started working on it by mid January , did a lot of digging for administrative borders data then getting the meteoalarm warning data right (those guys don’t have any integration point). I was done two weeks later.

In the mean time I was trying to raise the awareness about spincloud. I submitted the site so some mapping/mashup themed websites, improved the indexing (still working on it). Then Wednesday last week the European bloggers finally found it. UK’s Mapperz ran a nice little story that seems to have set the things in motion. A number of other bloggers picked-up the story and a surprisingly good feedback came from Italy: Matteo and italiasw.com did a great job while  gisdk.blogspot.com of Denmark  noticed the RSS facilities. Then the referral machine kicked in,  killerstartups.com, programmableweb.com amongst the sites linking. And thus the second spike registered on the traffic meter:

This one was three times bigger than the first spike and it was yet again all thanks to the blogger community that saw something useful in spincloud.

Things are looking up.  There are a few sites in Asia following spincloud: drchoi.or.kr and wangtam.com and I see that 16 people linked to spincloud on delicious. Yey!

The traffic tripled on an average from last month and I’m delighted. The server hums happily for now and I have all reasons to keep it that way.

Huzzah!

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Update Nov.25.2009: The twitter name has changed to @meteo_alarm. Please update your bookmark or follow list.

Between code refactoring and cooking new ideas, I took some time to add a new feature to Spincloud. Inspired by the crowd-sourced weather updates triggered by really bad snow storms in the UK, I (finally) started to see the advantages to using Twitter. So I took the Meteoalarm data that I mashed-up on Spincloud’s map and streamed it to Twitter.

So here it is: Meteoalarm on Twitter via Spincloud = @Meteoalarm @Meteo_alarm. The stream is updated twice a day and it presents a concise text-only representation of the color encoded weather warnings  in Europe for today and tomorrow.